Scansion
I despair of scansion’s bone filled mouth against my jugular,counting out my heartbeats, weighing my worth, one one thousand,
one one thousand, one one thousand, only sorrow has a sweeter song.
Even this sentence is a forest of wolves, jaws harumphing praise to fever,
eating Sunday’s god in flesh today. Whitetail lay in heaps across the ground,
barely skins; count the shadow of their ribs against the bloody snow.
Where The Heart Is
Your town is a strange prison. It must have hands that clenchwhen it knows you are looking at tickets or packing your bags,
when it somehow knows that the sun could end up in a different
house. In a multiverse of it’s choosing you’ll never leave.
Tires go flat. Warrants get issued. Loans are called in. The depot is
snowed in. The bus won’t run in this weather. Coastguard cutter is laid
up in the shipyard. The train only runs one way on days like this, weeks
like this. Months turn into years like this. And then it’s been a whole life lost.
Your town moved timber and taconite, heroin, cocaine, weed, snitches,
ditches, methamphetamine, creosote, fish, young girls, coal, grain and
whitewashed history. A secret cemetery lays beneath your town.
Don’t call it escape. Or forever. You can walk away. Run. Start a new life.
Drive. Skip. Run don’t walk. One day when you are minding your own business
you may get an email. It could say “you have a new DNA match to explore.”
It could be a ransom note.
There has never been a lock on the door.
Pond By An Abandoned Shack
I wanted to walk across unyielding water, my faithin you ecstatic while I surveyed the rippling shore.
In my trance I saw the remnants of the work
you’ve done this summer, abandoned along the edges
of the pond – sawed-off stumps and poles that looked ok
to me. What made you leave those laying there, cast
off among half-eaten broken buds and branches? Dreaming
by day I have occasionally stumbled upon bright blue and
red cans insulted with advertising, canting starkly against
the hard held green and yellow forest floor. I have grown
silent eating my sandwich, as I watched you swim. My spirit
wandered in and out, I listened for the pause before the slap.
Overhill
(Walking in love near Chota and Tanasi)
not there, moving in shadow. I listened for you until you
heard me. I’ve come to share your secret if you’ll let me.
Spiders tied between the trees above the map upon the
path of the causeway over the lodge house. Surrounded
by tons of packed black dirt, covered in crayfish, we are.
A Turtle with the full moons on her shell settled
into underwater branches. She wedged herself between
them with a tight grip on her deathbed, long ago.
Now I see you turtle shell. Resting among the rocks
and shale in a year of draught, covered in brown
clay, I gather you to me. No sacrifice. No alter.
Tim Moder is a member of Lake Superior Writers and The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. His poems have appeared in The Sinking City Review, The Coachella Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Door Is A Jar Magazine, and others. His chapbook All True Heavens out with Alien Buddha Press June 2022. Website: timmoder.com. Twitter @ModerTim, Instagram @moder_poet_tim
Art: field persistence trace, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2023. Twitter: @frede_kenter.
IceFloe Press 