Author: Shanna Compton

Seven Dollars & Eighty-Eight Cents

It’s raining
gray & dismal
numbers, the field
quivering in the runnels
along the windowpanes

It’s April near tax day & raining
numbers detached from time,
a list of last year & the trips
I don’t remember taking,
displacement being general

Eight days, eleven days,
twenty two days, forty seven
days, no journey under a couple
thousand in airfare & nothing
that moved the needle

from your arm, knit
a frayed bone, healed a worn
pattern, softened any referral of pain
or relieved the skipping gouge
in our circular groove of history

Yeah, they’re playing our song, again

& we found ourselves swaying
& shoved by circumstance
& terminology into a corner
until we coalesced
after decades of trying

into a flint-chipped
point of
no

Jaws of the Deer

 Ma’am, is this your alpaca? I found it on my lawn. 

No, must be loose, from the next town over. 

But are you sure it’s not a llama? 

Or a short, kinda fluffy giraffe? 

Pretty sure. I know my critters.

Speaking of which, could you hold my bird

a minute? I gotta see to this piranha 

that’s trying to chew up my cat. 

Sure, I can hold your bird with my spectral hand. 

But she’s flashing low-power. Do you have her charger handy? 

The outlet in this dog’s nose over here is free.

A painting called Glimmer by Sally Stanton, acrylic & mixed media, 36 x 36 inches, 2024.

*This one I wrote in March during an ekphrastic workshop, after one of my friend Sally Stanton’s paintings, but I revised it a little bit today.

Teeny Elephants Now!
Tender Elevators at Noon,
Twin Engine Numerator,
& Tawny Night Eagles?

Too Naughty, Ernie!
Timid Energy Never
Tainted Everyone’s Nougat,
Though Enough Nodded!

Tired? Even Thinking
The English Nanny
That Everybody No’d
Told Elsie Nothing

Takes Emergency Numbers!
This Elvish Numinosity
Talks Ever Nonsensically
Then Eeks North.

Subsume yourself
into the pale

green of the lichen
& the brighter green

making up a patchwork
a coverlet of mosses

Allow the spores
to encroach

Every day in the woods
is a million years

many trillions of drop-
lets quivering

against the curved
desire of the meniscus

You’re right on the edge
about to fall

Lavender for sleep
rosemary for regret—
that’s not right

No one interrupted
your thought—
you weren’t thinking

In the moon’s mind
the earth suffers—
a rain of bombs

night after night
It’s difficult to witness—
the pocked surface

& slick serpents
of dark smoke—
but in the silence

of space
the moon knows—
it’s worse

on the surface
The moon’s
been there

unseen
so many nights
so many times

Sundown might be
a showdown if you
can believe the shitposting

Sundown is gold
a little pink
some scraggly blue

hung on the tip of the hill
among some forward-
thinking scraps

of cloud here
in the concrete world
where Artemis lovingly

hovers in the glow
of the moon
Aloud I can’t say it

but inside we’re all
hollering it: Shut
up & sit down & just

go away forever
You drain slime
You dog-unworthy waste

You sociopathic dunce
in the corner
of every one of our brains

I stand with fronds in my hands again
awaiting the tinge of dawn—
the first on the continent

It comes with a breakfast package
if you book early enough,
like spring three years before

But who am I to deny
anyone these expansive views
or cheap egg dishes on a forested island

in a diner nobody is likely to nuke
for the foreseeable mossy summer
What a gift these old-growth

woods are, these red-lacquered
low-slung chairs sprawled
endearingly in evergreen shade

so far east and north
that watching for whales shifts
the clock an hour

& the seabirds look at you
beckoning you to leap
from the side

to swim
out further
easter & easter

further east than the rising sun

Drove home in a pink fog
with the peaks of a bridge
poking through

like the masts of some boat
I don’t know the terminology for
heading out

from the tidal river
to the sea with the town
we’d just blown glowing

in the pink fog behind us
In the morning, they say
it’s a good sign

In the evening much less so
Or I don’t know
maybe the reverse

I’m not sure I believe the summary
of the experiment

of the women
and the piles of worn shirts

The collared and the torn
The frayed elbow

The scuffed snaps
flaking white paint

Laundry is pretty concrete
You’re washing & folding

a shared idea once
or twice a week for years

Gently putting each other
into neat little drawers

You do mine
& I do yours

I want you to think big here
he said. The forest trembling behind him
like water about to brim
over the lip of the leak bucket.

Among them slipped
the fallen bodies,
the fruitfall of a season’s
second glance.

There’s a word that’s off limits,
but it’s the only word for it—
this littering of corpses.

The birch tips going pinker
just thinking about it,
going so twigpink
you could taste it.

All the stream could do
was sit there
looking freezing. And I said
oh yeah how big.

Encrusted dustbin
o scrolling wind of late
capital and hematoma
let yourself go

Let your fustiest
notions glow with a neon
rot that’s gotten riper
just while I’ve been standing here

Unfurl all them spangles
Hitch your stars to a red pony
wagon on its last-legged way
round the bend, round the bend

Tap shoe
a lost bag on a porch step
a lie somebody told & stuck to.

After all this time
a bundle of questions
like an old coffee can full of bent nails.

You aren’t saying what you think
you’re saying. Maybe you’re not saying
much at all. And the pine sways

and she stays anyway.
You aren’t undressing this doll.