Spectators
after Rilke
The surrounding spectators
have us badly paired,
too much of a calculation.
Suddenly we are falsely colored
in metallic silk
under heavy weights,
confused in our windowed skin.
We chase a cloud of tears.
Some of the spectators
already lie in the graveyard,
yet they stare at this suburban sky.
We are wanderers,
shrunk in our skin, living on
despite the fruit of displeasure.
The spectators bend and twist us
in the oiled slippery air
of infinite space
while we convalesce
with our scarcely trying mothers,
our affectionate toys.
♨
Coyotes
bent on prey
sidle into the woods
near my house
soundless indifferent
gray among grasses
what have they taken
from me at the edge
of the field what
part of me stays
with them in the brush
♨
Let Me Not Say
I will not tell you how relieved I am
when I don’t have to cook,
or how much I need to be alone,
or say how determined I was to turn on
the car radio and listen to politics
though I knew you’d hate it,
or tell you how I sink into violent
cop shows as into a soporific soup,
or how it annoys me sometimes
that you’re so kind, so organized,
how you never forget to mail the letter
or wake me before you go to the store,
not say how in your excellence, so modest,
I feel my own pallid aspiration
(again I forgot to call my brother),
or how I need so many hot baths
to stay calm in these terrible days,
not say that most of our stuff
is mine mine mine, old stuff—
my grandmother’s Chinese screen,
my father’s platinum whale, his set of Kipling—
not tell you how much I wish
you had piles of things too,
just because you wanted them!
—Submitted on 10/31/2022
Cammy Thomas is the author of Tremors (Four Way Books, 2021). Her debut collection, Cathedral of Wish (Four Way Books, 2005) won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent poems have appeared in On the Seawall, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Porch, Ghost Quarry, Sixth Finch, and Amsterdam Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2017), and Echoes From Walden (Wayfarer Books, 2021).
Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.
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