Featured Poem

Puff Balls

 

Puff balls in the grass   a clutch brought on by summer rain 

silently   the way lies come about and 

 

we have to live with them spreading under the skin of our

lives. Just one night and they've laid 

 

an archipelago through the softly prying dark. Tug them 

free   slice them   fry them in butter and

 

they're golden ingots of some mother lode   deliquescent

melting in earthly pleasure   another 

 

language on your tongue. They'll go on pronouncing their

selves into autumn   there in the grass

 

there in bitten windfalls. A premonition prescient with early

warnings   trying to be heard   their napped 

 

heads almost touching   precocious babies babbling in dreamless 

sleep. They're tuned to radio waves

 

seismic tremors   to what the stars say that is still travelling 

through the cochlea of space   their 

 

faint exclamations of surprise at being born. They hear us 

surfacing from sleep   making love   haunting 

 

silver backed mirrors of the house crowded with the dead.

Each iteration crowning through soil

 

ophthalmic   blind to the holy order of jackdaws landing for 

communion   spilling a billion spores.

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Published in The London Magazine, 2023