by Chris Gallagher
A card you sent last year
Now and then I find
the confetti that you put inside
still on my floor here, or there
Glinty pink
I leave it on purpose.
As now you cast your silence to my every corner.
My Comforter
The blanket at the foot of your bed—
Unfold it only for me
As I sleep in a stream of sun
On your midday couch.
Sanctuary
It’s a long story
She said
And promptly forgot it
She proceeded to tell it
Shopping to sell it
Lies and some lies
Truth and half-true
Sea elder longs for the uphill lie
Sanctuary waits beyond the curvèd drive
It’s simple
She said
But no it is not
Mixing like cocktails
We promptly drank
And forgot.
Johns Island Rain
Warm four in the morning rain
Storms out to sea that flash and roll—
mourning in silence
Storms weave themselves in, out of backroad plots
Thundertops tower improbably past that flat beach
horizon
Science fiction forests of cloud rise as an angry army of
electric moisture
A huddle of small low islands; sways.
What can you do? Nothing.
Tilt your head back and let the centuries run rivulets
down the corner of your mouth into the salt marsh and gravel shoulder of the
roads—
Dry Street and Winnies Way; Shadow Pond and Blackground
The Cassique chiefs— Black-Crowned Night Herons
wordlessly watch as we ground and spit their old
bones into fairway mulch.
The storm has merged with the sea to the east— your
poor tracks in her wake; gone.
A small last pebble of time before the island calls her
warm, patient life to stir.
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