Author: Shanna Compton

Dear harpies, hello
Are you spooling obliviously 
in longitudinal lines
or a stack of little belts

Summering so voraciously it felt
like it fell from the pocket
of Long Overdue & a rando
kindly handed it back to you

Your kick pleats are so cute
& your silver curls little cups
of needle shine that smell like sage
& cedar or pine & lavender or seawater & hay

They shine like turquoise tinted glass in the sun
or the stone with the white veins running though it
or that time we came upon each other in the woods
behind the house each thinking the other upstairs

I’m sorry I putter I’m sleepy not sorry
to be soon sleeping so sleeping so so
so shuteye so moondrool so deeply lapping
the plum-colored lake into which
I now deliciously drop 

Up the hill & down
the hill    

The hill 
is a mountain

The mountain
is 976 feet above sea level

Sea level is a lever 
to pull in case of emergency

a switch to flood the darkness
with light 

a parallel understanding 
to hills & the way they part

along one side & bristle 
with evergreens amid fallen trees

One year half the island burned
but the other half held its breath

& today the old growth
looks around

shakes its heavy limbs
& wants nothing more 

than to stride
off into the sea

beyond the green bell buoy
beyond the green ringing of the bell

Does your shape
have little legs sticking out

appendages going nowhere
a goggled eye or crooked fin

a comb-shaped hairdo
or a bit of a saggy muddle

around the middle
or what?

Let that shape express
itself and relate

to the other shapes
on the canvas 

You can construct the shape
sharpen up its boundaries

build a little bridge
from one shape to another

• 

Thinking in mineral tones
& earth pigments

Yellow ochre dreams of
burning all the others

with her golden eyes
& her milky voice

Unlongingly she puddles
on a plate    She’s just 

sunning

Roused out of my swoon
hollow & absent
how could I fight?

I had been carrying
something that looks like a knot
in the wood

It was not a knot
in the wood   It was a thought
but wasn’t no good

Fresh lettuce & oxygenated air
have skinned me terribly    A sunset leans 
exactly in the opposite direction

If I were a moviemaker
I’d set about hunting for 
a bouquet of daisies in the waiting room

*Bibliomanced from random phrases of Julio Cortázar’s A Certain Lucas + one pronoun change (her to my).

Diagonal lines are going somewhere—
teeter like they’re about to
                                    fall

The curvature of the field
is incomplete    an opening   or exit

Page after page of black
white gray      and then

a flash of yellow      As I slip
into sleep I recognize its pattern

dipping in and out of air     —goldfinch

We drove into the sun
A few trees flowered

You put some music on
& I hummed a little

Innumerable bridges later
We spoke at the same time

saying the same thing
then both said nevermind

talking to myself
We stopped at the record store

but the thing you wanted
had just sold out

No hurry at all
to drive into the sun

as a few trees flower

Green-hued blue
Red-hued blue
Primary blue
Blue rain in 
a blue mood under
a rankled blue moon

What I wouldn’t give
to give it over
to somebody else    the long
tail game of wait & see
aches with misspent vigilance
& never pays out

I’ve got nothing
up my frilly poet sleeve
No ochre tokens to cash
No dogeared cards in naphthol red
Just a printed map
with a few things circled

Where you wanna go

Where you been

Where you know who you are

Choose strife & chew well
The shards are not so tender

The tv cuts itself off
The lights upstairs cut themselves off

The kitchen is dark
I’m just dimming a little 

& from the other room
the internet glows—

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know
where your poems are?

Paint dries at different 
speeds, a fact & annoyances

& from the other room
the internet glows—

Did you mean blood books?
Did you mean blood books?

Sure

For days on end we use only
black and white
I see what I want to see
& you see the opposite

Days standing on end?
Lying end to end?
How many times do they wrap
the earth or reach to Saturn

As many days as bees
in the goldenrod    as keys
on pianos lying end to end
to the hull of the Titanic

Wherever that is     If Jean-Michel
Basquiat could do it so could
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Don’t play around    I mean it

Punch his chest when he chokes
& don’t take the pink scarf
like a charm reversed
like a talon in the eye or heart

When a language has only two words
for colors they are those

Type it once for yes
Type it twice for all of it
to come flooding pouring
brimming back

She walked up there half the night
She hasn’t said a word
She leans her forehead against the windowpane 
 & looks out at the country

His face is sweating
He’d better not
He strikes off down the fork
 & has no qualms

It stays hot for too long
The room smells of food & stale smoke
Something that needs fixing
 & the moon is almost full

The moon leaps & shies sideways
like a spooked horse

*Bibliomancy: Constructed from random fragments from The Hunter by Tana French.

I wish my friend a happy spring
& he says Snow is falling
Yeah snow is always falling
generally & everywhere
if you’re in one of those scenes
under a dome with plastic trees
a plastic sled or wagon
a neat little house
& somebody shakes it

Later tonight I’m posting
myself as Jesus healing the sick
because he’s a doctor
& doctors glow like that
& wear robes as Gwar plays
in heaven but leaves open
the gates a crack so we
sickies below can all
rock out. Shake it!

We’ve been left out
again on the stoop next to the soggy
Chinese menus, the locksmith
cards & misdelivered letters
for neighbors who split
this dome a decade ago
for a country that will pay
you to move to it
up to 81 thousand dollars
Those dudes are never
coming back

A few days ago
one of the deer put her head
through the little fence I’d put up
to keep her from eating
the fledgling daffodils

She was definitely trying
What do you think you’re doing?
I asked, which startled her
& she threw her head back
to the left in a big Not I gesture

taking the fence panel
with her

They’re nearly blind you know
& impossible to reason with

Just lower your head
Just look at the ground
Don’t look at me, the ground
—it will slide right off
you silly animal

She took a few steps & then
a few more. She hung out
with the rest of the deer
for a while like that—the stupid fence
dangling from her neck

like a stockade or like a muppet
crashing through the letter H
They just look at me
when I talk to them, rarely run
but we’re not doing so well

on the English yet
I saw her today with the same
group as before—two other adults
two young adults & herself
—free. Oh good. No fence.

All that was missing
were my daffodils

I tend to look at the clock
once or twice a week
when the numbers
are my birthday.

Sometimes three times.
It means nothing.

In the woods today
the clock thing didn’t happen
because I’m practicing not looking
at anything other than the woods.

I took seven pictures
of various patterns in the birches,
which aren’t white—though
we all agree to call them that.

Sometimes silver. Sometimes gray.
I’ll look back at the pictures,
never show them to anyone.
I might tell you about it.

Run it through a filter
to clarify your thoughts

Dark, light, midtone
a muddle we call a garage sale

We slip shadows to each other
across the mismatched table settings

A group of misgivings and sentiments
arrive, hang their jackets on the stool seats

& order double everythings
while you look between the rough-hewn rafters

& your hands, the rough-hewn rafters
& your hands, as though

you’d just put something down
but couldn’t remember what

& the spring light & trilling
of the peepers saturate the area

at the open double door

I’m so over it
I was writing this poem
when my then-boyfriend, Useless,
got arrested at a Gulf War protest
in 1991

Steel-toe boots
to the skull
Steel-toe boots
dive off the stage
Steel-toe boots
to the bottom of the fairly slimy pool

You’re so high you’re looking for
the helmet you already have on
your head, visor down
& won’t let me borrow
your books

I wore men’s suits I thrifted
on the east side
with long red hair & lipstick
I’d wear that now too
if no one else did

So over it
So over it
So overcoming it
Upchucking around the globe again
in a malaise of pallid & vicious repetition
Boots to the head
Boots on the ground
What boots go best with this
motheaten suit?

April, you thrill
of frilly yellow thangs
& peeps of purple!

You greeny hues
tinkering among the mosses
& the pippities of kinglets

who flash their neon crowns!
You humectant, furling, swollen
stream of snowmelt

& last year’s heartschmerz,
flung open like the barn’s
upper story gaping for hay!

Hey! April! You brill-
iant capillary of sunshine,
let’s flounce!