Poems

With words like doom-scrolling…
what century are we in? What time is it?

From across the closed world
you tell me you imagine your bookshelf

as a row of edible leaves.
I order my days as a Vermeer woman

with an apron—baking bread, taking time
to make the bed, the one I lie on

drowning in white noise I call The Hum.
The other day, I don’t know which one,

I heard a call.
It was new to my garden.

I wanted to understand how Time
lodged itself in that black-capped turn

of a curious head.
It had one eye cocked giving me

the time of day before setting off
on some miraculous migration

Or was it, like me, here to stay?
In some loose part of me I hoped

it would never end—this day,
this reckoning sky now open

to conversations with small things.
You climb the stairs an hour each day

calling it your solo trek to the top of the mountain
praying for enough oxygen to make your way down.

 First appeared in Plumwood Mountain, 2020