SEAN BURKE
Sean Burke lives next to a bird refuge on a small island off Massachusetts.
He received his BA from Naropa University and is working toward an MFA
at Goddard College. His poems are forthcoming or recently published in
Sawbuck, GlitterPony, Bombay Gin, and Pinstripe Fedora.
Spring Chicken
better than we sing ourselves
a Safeway bag in a bare branch
tries to reconcile words with
birds flying from them
into grapefruit hues of sky
the afternoon provides for us
black trees bent to green
themselves as crabgrass
sprawls out on the lawn
like a drunken john
on a seedy hotel mattress
someone kicks his dog
now who needs that? and
a short mustachioed man
pushes an ice cream cart
down the sidewalk selling
popsicles, three colors
April 8 (Catalog)
In the bright-blue day: a few stray
birds, coffee, last thaw of snow,
cable news (alligator blood
may be medicinal) the radio
playing Metallica at the
construction site next door
(O Nikola Tesla! O electro-
magnetic waves with frequencies
below those of visible light!)
still leafless trees, cars and
SUVs of every color, air
shedding its wet, clouds
thinned to cotton-ball wisps,
the telephone wires which
slowly become vestigial, people
walking with kids and dogs
(O Canis lupus familiaris!
domesticated 7,000 years
before the invention of
the wheel!) the sun shining
over the marsh and moving
through the inner rim
of the Orion Arm, and
now a single pumpkin bug
scurrying up the door.
God,
if you are still going to the store today
please pick up the following items:
a flying green squid
edible music
giant cyclopean trees
warm summer snow
polka dot winds
a wish-granting marmoset
fire-breathing cats
and liquid flowers
(in the bottle, not the can.)
We are all out.
Thanks a ton,
Poem
better be trembling eye aloft half heart
half horse eying the half moon like an artichoke
heart aloft in the trembling cosmos
names squint at tangency
here is my portrait
in a very small dream
a pigeon-winged Napoleon
a soft barbarism
eat until you are full
day is a stomach
night is not hieroglyphs carved in bone
long ago horses were tongues
vision is reverence
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