---

Watching Zebras and Doves

Northern end near the pyramid-
shaped Sheraton, a small population
of Zebra doves resides and breeds,
getting everything they need
from gardens and grounds

around the hotel. Most likely
descendants of escaped caged birds,
fending for themselves now,
seeking out seeds and insects.
Geopelia striata from Southeast Asia—

slender, black and white on brown
upperparts. Watching them, taking
my time, Africa still on my mind,
I recall the Burchell’s zebras,
observed just days ago grazing

the savanna, and doves—
Red-eyed, Laughing, Emerald-
spotted, Wood, Cape Turtle,
African Mourning adorning
the bush with grace.

Watching zebras and doves,
one begins to believe again,
to understand why the ancients
worshipped animals and birds.
These gentle ones hurt no one,

take only enough to subsist,
are neither greedy nor needy,
ask nothing of anyone. Oh,
to approach the world with such
non-aggression and clear vision.

---

Camels Going to Market

In the bed of a Toyota truck,
they ride, looking dignified—
                nonchalant and unconcerned
                as cars and lorries on all sides churn,

some speeding past, some tail-gating.
Their eyes, long double-lashed, ask
                What’s the rush? Why not try waiting
                your turn, this lovely autumn morning?

I’ve watched them unbridled,
                grazing the rodat, or stretched out
in close proximity to their beloved
                Ziziphus nummularia,

                lazing away the hot midday.
Calmly one gazes my way,
demanding respect. I would protect
                all three from the day’s ordeal.

No doubt they’ve served their masters well.
                One rises slowly, sinuously
                from its sitting position, hinting
                                of growing dissent, no menace

in her eyes—only a dispassionate gaze
                void of fear or trepidation
                as she moves nearer her destination.
                                Camels so full of grace,

                                heading to the marketplace,
my heart grieved to see them come
to this sad plight. Yet I take note:
                each one’s appareled in celestial light.

---

Bluefish Lane

The whole west side of the road
intentionally wild
protecting beach dwellers
from the munitions dump
across the river. No one tames
wax myrtle extending its long fingers
towards the street, leaving it to mingle
with sweetgum, oak, and the dead sticks
of something that rotted in last year’s hurricane.
You can lean a long time brown and broken
in the woods
and no one denies you
your place

---

Phone Conversation with My Husband about Our Final Resting Places

Listen, I know you want your ashes tossed
into the Gulf at Galveston, and I’ll be
at peace a mile out in the Atlantic,
but I’d still like to leave
some marker of my path on this earth.

So, let’s invest in fish plates!
I saw them today lining the boardwalk,
the length of a footprint and barely
three inches wide at the belly,
black slate smartly adorned
with yellow letters. You know how sweet
the boardwalk is here
on this tiny North Carolina island—
no Atlantic City casinos in blazing lights
or corn dog stands flanking every step,
just five blocks of wooden planks
between guest cottages with geraniums
blooming in window boxes
and dunes that sweep towards the sea.

Yes, we get our choice of inscription,
(a fifty-character limit). Almost all
of the hundred or so already sunken
into the boards engrave memory—
happy memories here, in loving
memory, and who wouldn’t remember
stepping off sand into foreverness,
curved rim of the horizon
all the cradle you need.

Hmm, I like that: They loved
the ocean and it loved them back, love,
(each other’s name). The only thing is,
it’s over the limit, and three loves
on a tiny bluefish’s back will sink it for sure.

I knew you’d understand! No bones
buried under a private stone. Here we’ll be
where everyone strolls in others’ footsteps
to watch sea oats sway, feel
the ocean breathe, and hear gulls calling
all of our names.

---

Orange Butterflies/Orange Blossoms

They match
                the way lovers match,
how lives blend into one
                another, how for one
                     sunlit
                                moment
                you can’t tell
                                wing from bloom

---

You Can’t Put the Red Sea in a Poem

a famous poet warned. If you let it in, your poem is crammed
with two million Israelites clutching babies in arms,
with satchels of clothes and unleavened bread,
and you’ve invited in the enormous weight of a God
who punishes evil by slaying slave owners’ children,
so here come the Egyptians as God splits open
that unmentionable sea just in time
for the migrants to cross and closes it right up
on the pursuers, and your poem is choking on all those
drowning men, flailing horses and wrecked chariots,
and next thing you know you have races and nations and power
and poverty all spilled in the red ink of misery
and your poem is overwhelmed—
it’s baffled that He (since it’s always he) never sat them all down
and explained this wasn’t what He had in mind
those intense seven days he created a world so magnificent
poets can’t stop trying to describe it, which is what happened
to me when it snowed at the beach at high tide, not just a dusting
but a full-on onslaught of snow we hadn’t seen
in these parts in years, downing telephone wires
and snapping tree branches and power out.
When the snow finally stopped and the tide receded,
it left a wide strip of sand along the shore, snow mounds piled
like crystal dunes on one side and the ocean’s perpetual roar
on the other, and in between—the tiny miracle
of a parting I passed through, kicking scattered seashells
like nothing strange and beautiful had happened,
nothing that needs to mention the Red Sea.

---

Words Matter: Choose Wisely

says the sign on the red and white cooler
in my neighbor’s front yard. Kids on bikes,
curious walkers, tourists who wander off the beach
lift the creaky top. We find smooth stones,
egg-sized, still heavy with the mountain
they long ago deserted, each painted
with a word. Should I prop open my door
with imagination, anchor fly-away papers
with song, or ponder oblivious and obvious
as bookends? Sunrise could last all day
on the mantel, and I could fiddle with detrimental
in my jacket pocket without causing harm. Visitors
will surely depart with dolphins
nestled in duffle bags, a teenager will tuck courage
under her pillow. I choose wisely,
so understanding remains
for the home that needs it most.

---

content warning for animal violence

Murder Theory

               “Image: a meadow and then a meadow backwards.”
                              —Bradley Trumpfheller

In the clearing, the calf can only make
a wide circle around what it does not know.
Its mother somewhere close, lowing and chewing
grass, the tags through their ears reflecting sunlight.
They have been assigned a number. They have been
given a purpose. In the clearing, a man with a knife,
advancing on the calf. It is out of the way. No one
will guess what he is doing. The man is starving,
but that doesn’t mean you should have sympathy
for his situation. He is about to kill something living,
and close to its mother. For years, I cleaned my plate
of meat. I divorced what I saw from how it got there.
At a farm once, I was taught to kill a chicken. I put it
in the kill cone and watched another person cut
its throat, watched the blood come ribboning out.
The knife, sticky and feathered and sharp. People need
to eat. But—indelible is the squawk, the panicked flap
of wings. I remember saying no. I remember saying stop.
And then my mother, with her bowed head. It’s not
that she didn’t see. It’s that she wouldn’t.

---

The Contract

               After Sylvia Plath

God, were I more like You
I might care less about the world.
Might care more instead about the safe
chalk mess of children
on the sidewalk

coloring their small, incredible lives
green and pink and running home
with hands dusted in glitter.
I address the hypothetical infants:
My children, my children—

how I wish the world for them.
I wish them candles, a light
that doesn’t falter in the deadpan
drum of the future, death darkening
into a faded spot on an old shirt.

Any creator worth their salt
has an obligation to uphold,
has opted into an agreement.
It is why I am terrified of
my children, my children—

I owe them a future, like how You
up there owe me the benefit
of Your creation. I do not ask much.
I do not ask much at all. I only ask that
You honor the contract.

---

Pastoral with Birds

I crept into the November night to watch. The door opened, bent
like a broken finger, and outside, the first snow of the season,
blanching the concrete. My old car in the lot, dusted, as though with
confectioner’s sugar and rusted from nineteen years of travel. My feet, traveled
and bone-sore, toes curled against the cold. And around me in that darkness,
the chittering of small creatures: a black squirrel scavenging the ground,
in the trees, miscellaneous birds. I have measured the years
by the beating of their wings, by the worms bisected in their
beaks. I watched them scrabble in the winter months: the waxwing,
the cardinal, the American robin. Once, a snowy owl perched
on the branch of a dead tree in my front yard, and I thought its tracks were
the handwriting of God. This had something to do with my dying grandmother
and symbolism I think, the picture my father had sent me, where she was hooked
to the world by a needle in her arm: red tube against white sheets, like the
chokeberry bush outside my childhood home against snow. I waited
for the season to deliver me to a better understanding. I fed the owl: a mouse had died
behind the kitchen cabinets. For days I wondered where the death-smell
was coming from, and when I found it, I wondered how I hadn’t heard it
squeaking, and how it died alone, not unlike my grandmother. I carried it out
with a pair of tongs. I left it on the garden path. I let nature do its yearning,
bloody work, watched the owl devour the body of the mouse and felt nothing
except a singular kind of regret: that I was not small enough to warrant
such a dispatch, that I had not died too, and what’s more, my death would not
be useful. It would be just a death. The bird, just a bird.