4 poems
Radio
The sweat-streaked sky’s blurred ambience
Bakes crazy mud radiant patterns in red hawk feathers
While bleached light knifes through weeds and mirror
Chewed mint near the ditch
Swatting gnats away from your legs
Pungent smell of hot garbage
At the recycling center sans lilac
To shatter the brown bottles
Then, the green ones means a kindness
As a stomped box
Reminds an enclosure to music
Weather systems
(“today I feel like”)
Point to the corresponding kitty face
On my t-shirt —> the pixelated glare of cola
Dilates the pupils
Splintered green
Shotgun shells
In a bed of pine needles near the pasture
Mood wide as wild blue sheet plastic
Tacked by firewood
I was cemetery music—an idea A host of sparrows
Collapsed into roots yarrow goosefoot chatter
Grass someone else sang to an unborn baby Taken for
Another torqued
Constellation of barbs
Scatter that fence to
High heaven
If somebody don’t help me
Language
s Torn
Weathered
Screen
Dewy
Mosquitos
+++
Hatching
Tawny
Lamplight
Incomprehensible
As the smoldering husk
Of barn-
Hollowed dawn
Creation alone as each tree folded within
The gleaming ordonnance of wide evergreen rows
Grief, you can’t see the end of—
Stray feathers unsettled along the periphery
The rest is decomposition
Walking out through
blistered waves of feedback
Belief,
an occasion
like goldenrod allergy
Sneaks up on you at the screen door
Nathan Hauke is the author of two book-length collections of poems, Every Living One (Horse Less Press, 2015) and In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes (Publication Studio, 2013) as well as four chapbooks. His poems have been included in Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). His poetry has been published in 4Ink7: An Unction from the Holy One, American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, New American Writing, TYPO, and Zen Monster among others.