Chelsea Eckert
THE TROUT SINGING
While your mouth
rounded into that
pinkish lozenge, I
looked for the finger-
nail cuts on your
neck, and I measured
your curious pull.
Or tried. I tried.
I was not in love,
am not now, just as
the moon does not
love the Earth but
instead writes
lovingly of it, in
the tugging of
glass, in fierce
beach neutrality.
Fluttering, those
words, your words,
took on sounds that
conjured household
pets from the pool-
side. No rainbows
frowned across your
body, skimming
scales — not one
bent streak. Just
pinkish flesh, again,
for older predators.
You owned the hook. I
like to imagine so.
ALLIGATOR MISSISSIPIENSIS
paradoxically
long-legged this wait: no
unsettling in the pool
underneath bruised thighs for
show this wait: a flooded
space a spearhead that wait:
parting seas before men
in grassless times the infra-
sound bellow the infra-
sound ardor nothing so
American so man-made
than waiting for lovers
to cluster overcome
A BUS HITS A PHOENIX
Earlier, well, under the wheels, I
saw something like a red moon and
well-
trodden by the city and dead, its
eyes loud like applause, applause
after a violin recital before which
you had not practiced. The
driver murmured thank you
and I and my folks shouldered
the blame for the death of mythology.
The bird — it had imperfect deltas for
tail feathers or I suppose they looked
like long sad tongues. I
think I’ll come out today.
WHEN WE WERE SMALLER ANIMALS
Yes, sometimes we were a flock,
an isosceles of birds alighting
on the silvered edges of road
signs. Sometimes we forgot to
land with both feet and the
wires sent us barreling down
like so much chalk dust, so
ignoble, oh. Our feather-tips
there on the ground danced and
flexed iridescent and so did our
mothers’, our fathers’ — that
was all it took in those days
to become the heads of a riled
parliament with shiny eyes, like
those of calves rushing forth
to see the world beyond the cow.