FOUR POEMS FOR TREES
 
1.
 
Across this formal pleasure,
horizon contours mountain range:
 
sawmill, birdsong, lodgepole. Spilled
 
into my voice. Declarations of heartfelt territory
 
lost among these splintered branches.
 
 
2.
 
Frank O’Hara’s subway,
and his blade of grass.
 
 
3.
 
Transplanting monkey puzzle. Prolonged,
a coastline errant. Ponderosa. Sechelt, breeze.
 
This sentence of foliage
reflects our complexities: such clear
 
and exposed. Abstraction, stripped excess
of tree-stubble. What season
 
of nouns. Audre Lorde: There is
 
no separate survival.
 
 
 
4.
 
Where my limbs meet yours, a poem
as dense
 
as a brick.
 

THIS TITLE DOES WORK

He said
 
inspiration is like being fucked
by the Gods and if that’s so
 
then I suppose
it makes sense
that you’d try to decant
 
what they’ve filled you with,
to bottle its
essence while
the sediment settles.
 
Ceded ground I guess
but what about getting
free? Form feels like
a workweek:
useful, but to whom?
           
What’s being
formed— a complex
structure— a vessel
to keep things in,
worlds which want to be
let out. Birds
           
can be observed in order
to be observed
or collected
to be caged
or killed
to be kept or consumed.
Either way
 
the point ceases to be
witnessing the wild,
turns toward capture,
possession, display,
moves our attention
away from subject
to frame— how it was
gilded, by whom
 
it was hung,
what the work is
worth— at which
point the bird’s flown,
the coop empty,
a wheel untrue, thrown off
Apollo’s chariot— dawn’s horses
on fire, now flaming
out towards dusk.

SIM CITY
 
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1 KJV
 
everything is narrative
nature is a myth.
 
the ancients knew that
humans were last to the party
 
and quick to call the cops
when things felt out of hand
 
(what’s it like to be
bounced from the club
 
by a flaming sword a
pair of angels?)
 
but seriously
who’s to say
 
that the flip wasn’t switched
I mean the swish wasn’t phished       
 
I mean the fish wasn’t dished            
I mean the witch wasn’t hitched
 
I mean the switch
flipped
 
this morning when I woke up
the fog-laden dawn carried on
 
till midday. I walked the dog
and wrote this poem on my phone
 
listening to Ethiopiques on my phone
drinking a blend of Kenyan coffee
 
paid for with my phone
which is powered by cobalt
 
mined by Congolese children
en Afrique
 
and this is how poetry has everything
to do with the deep
 
violence of colonialism
is complicit innit?
 
but anyway
as I was saying
 
who’s to say
that all of this
 
isn’t due to a toggle tripped
by a demi-god— a light
 
being, libidinous for pain,
or just bored?

Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a queer writer from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, perhappened mag, DEAR Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “Ken” won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and their chapbook “Teems///\\\Recedes” is forthcoming from Kelp Books. He tweets @seanickels.
​

TRASH TALK

​Litter begets
more litter-
ah, sure when
litter it.
I / it

lit
light
litter
along
the literal
littoral.

The ill litter it
refuse refuse
and garb age.

I utter a light
little iteration
against litter
alluding to
allusion, all
iteration and
​
assonance off
the road, on
the road and in
to ash, rash,
trash can.

​​Penn Kemp. Published online.

RIVER REVERY

Water abounds here, with this river

five times normal width for winter,
flooding roads and parks. The swell
carries whole trees along stampeding

currents. Yellow willows drop fifty-year
-old boughs in high winds. Standing
waves cover our usual walking path.

Climate change is certainly upon us,
from eleven below to eleven above in
hours, sinking back below freezing.

Green begins to bury the remnants
of flood, the wall of last fall’s leaves
packed level against the link fence.
​
Weird how all reverts, reverberates in
spring clarity as old detritus is dredged.