My poem “Some Old Boyfriends” will be published in the Spring of 2011 in the Kansas-based magazine, Inscape!
Some Old Boyfriends
The Cuttlefish
A cuttlefish wove nets,
his body the warp, the water the weft.
The way rain sleets off streets
his rapid skin could shift,
two skin layers that swayed,
the lower shadowing through
until he turned grainy, sand colored,
with a twist in the water
to show where he’d been.
The Guinea Fowl
A guinea fowl hollered his call,
“buckwheat, buckwheat,”
at the shape of his own feathered shadow.
The loudest bird, he’d sound the alarm
for anything, fox or milkman, cold wind.
With wings and wattle trembling,
his head nodded violently
on a neck thin and blue as a vein.
The Elephant
A bull elephant in full must
stinky and extra aggressive
made an unexpected visit
in the early afternoon.
Young, inexperienced, his tusks
still squat as flower buds
and his big flat eyes,
the elephant followed behind my safari vehicle
long after I’d stopped waving.
