Spring 2022, Volume 32

Poetry by Carol Alexander

Single Mother

Is she is beautiful or just something earth made
like raveled tails of afternoon under frizzed gray clouds.
She stoops to lead the planting of corn

while children squat with tin spades
& I don’t know if she is legal or a ghost train refugee.

Maize sheaves will sprout an intricate gold script
in black interstices of palmate leaves. Jungly birdsong,
the polymath mother’s feathered hair.

Each holds a fluted paper cup, tenement eyes
fielding fresh discoveries. A stratum of archaeology—

bottles, horseshoes, broken pilaster. Jawbone of an ass.
Sour soil from stables & communal waste; here’s architectural      detail
spring nosing musky smells, iron filings, daffodils

light raking the high cheekbones, nouns tumbling helplessly.
Grain is thumbed into shallow holes, the hoe teething on tough seed coats.
Illusion banked against bedrock. What comes up, a ceaseless curiosity.

Anniversary with Brief Dream Embedded

The lord knew you for a disturbance, a wraith
book of ambiguities & tobacco ambering a skirt pocket.
Study lamps flickered where a chrysalis mimicked dry wood.
Our mufti of clothed bones embraced lucidly, lingeringly.
From your pale forehead, I brushed away the early hoarfrost
sorry that my grief had once run thin. Watching a father fade,
his lonesome anniversary held among the butterflies
I triaged loss, necklacing jadeite eggs, whispering
Come, your fleeting season cannot wait.
Now flows the reckoning, water’s feint at stones
the fork eroding in your palm sinister
which hints at great or delicate catastrophes.
Meaning, I suppose, a less supple life: lost pearl teeth & sag,
each year’s dusty wing depositing verdigris on hills.

 

 

 

BIO: Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press, 2021), Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press, 2017.) Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, The Canary, The Common, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Hamilton Stone Review, One, Pangyrus, Pif, Ruminate, The Seattle Review of Books, Southern Humanities Review, Sweet Tree Review, Terrain.org and Third Wednesday. With Stephen Massimilla, she is co-editor of an anthology of social justice poems, due out Fall/Winter 2021.