Hannah Weiner

Dark angels are crying for her
and pluots are rolling on the floor

as the radio talk show scatters
its rant like flecks of sand flying

out windows where she’s alone
in her dreamy pagoda, swatting

at moths that infest her pea coat
like getting water from chopsticks

or licking the dark residue of wine
from the life line in her palm.

She’s burning in the furnace of debt
but it’s an ephemeral attachment

as the strands of spiderwebs laced
in leaf light embezzle her thoughts

the way the last dreams glimmer
even once they vanish from the mind.

Indian Orchard

Skunk-faced and burning. In the ilex and beneath, mostly space; the pull of the breeze devastates my balance. Hosiery on a clothesline basking in the sky: the seeds of dereliction there and dying candle of the moon crossed by planes. I fall. And wake with arm on forehead, sheet draped on thigh beside the doctor’s valise twinkling with steel. He says, speak up, the sky cannot hear you as blackbirds impale the light outside the square windows. Time is erased in a fine gauze of leaves, a tide of quivering stains. And in the silence along the quarry where the lovers jumped, the black water ripples with tri-colored fish, wary of our watchfulness and the abattoir to which the watching leads.

Last Garden

Against my right side, the wall. On the top of my head, her resting hand. The world opens from there. Into shapes of light, bleeding through the myrtle. What is planned is not quite intentional. It’s felt. A blip on the emotional radar that zeroes in. Or wings away. Like waiting all night for the dawn, knowing there are only so many dawns, most things take root. A panicle of agenda arising from the same stem and a flock of orange blossoms pushed by the same wind. The pattern goes on. Not quite a balance but a variance. The return of an echo to measure the long walk. Our bodies are here now, tending their evanescence. We dig. And from under the honeysuckle, a dark fawn leaps.