Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson

During Rain
by Charles Tomlinson

Between
slats of the garden
bench, and strung
to their undersides
ride clinging
raindrops, white
with transmitted
light as the bench
with paint: ranged
irregularly
seven staves of them
shine out
against the space
behind: untroubled
by the least breeze they
seem not to move
but one
by one as if
suddenly ripening
tug themselves free
and splash
down to be
replaced by an identical
and instant twin:
the longer you
look at it
the stillness proves
one flow unbroken
of new, false pearls,
dropped seeds of now
becoming then.

Harry Humes

Harry Humes

from The Bottomland:

Vultures

by Harry Humes

Three we found sheathed in ice

after a late freezing rain.

They were like glittering bottles

stuck on a branch,

their small eyes watching,

eyes that could see

rabbit guts half a mile away.

We lowered them in a sling

and carried them like logs to the shed.

Our daughter traced a finger

over the red turkey heads.

She lay next to them.

They were longer by inches.

Suddenly a horny leg broke through,

a shoulder, some wing feathers,

and then the stench of their true

design drove us away.

We left the shed door open and watched

from the kitchen as they wobbled out,

fussing their feathers, stretching their wings,

bouncing grotesquely, then rising easily,

beautifully, the world’s real

pragmatists using the slightest updraft,

scanning the landscape, scouring it.

Their whole being was set for this

Puritan hatred of living flesh,
this love of neatness.

Adam Fell

Adam Fell

from I Am Not a Pioneer:

Limbo

by Adam Fell

Light falling on snow

is naturally cast upward,

but we are not designed

to fully contain the glow.

We wake in the dark of the woods

and must go forward.

When we are killed, we respawn

a few feet back until we solve

the error that wrecks us.

Each time, our bodies make

a sound like yielding,

a comprehension, a crumpling.

A burning barn glitched

behind a restless static of leaves.

Hatchlings on the beach at night

scuttling toward the city,

mistaking it for the horizon.

Devotion extends forward

despite our bodies’ failures.

We leap and leap across

the voltaic rooftop letters

of a falling HOTEL sign.

We kill its current, watch it startle out.

We barely reach the ledge.

But barely is sufficient in a moving world.

Our flashlights make the cattle leak

from pens to pockets of drying grass.

To face ourselves, we respawn endlessly.

There are not fresh hoof marks.

There are fresh hoof marks.