3 poems
Dog Creek
Like a sad dog’s face in the window
You want to kiss it
You get lonely
When other people are sick
…………
Spent firework in the grass must have been some pretty thing
Vibrating spokes of light that smolder like paths between trees
Concentrate on the electrostatic forces holding the one you’re on together
Hatchling insects obscure the clarity of the river bed
Can’t help
The medium
Someone boarded over a window
Then busted it up Tell you what
Can’t help
Someone I might say
Who lives in that big condo You could
Seeded rows Get
Means the rich One of those
Husband this garden too
Up at
Dog Creek
Thinking
Like a barn wall
Crawling with honeybees
There’s no reason
To think of you alone
("To think of
You alone") Talk
Along the river
Back again
For a fix
Like a hummingbird
Drawn to
Wet leaves for sugar
I let the names of loved ones fill me
Took a deep breath
Across the lip of the bottle
Talk along the river
To think of you alone
(“To think of
You alone”)
Beagles at the beagle farm
Howl something dreadful
Children screaming
Bloody murder
Daylight chiseling trees
Into scuffed violets
Couldn’t tell
Who it was
Siphoned that gas
Out of
The farm pump
The living and the dead
Talk
Along the river
Stillness
Pierced by
Intricate
Outcroppings of
Wild carrot
Gold threads
For K
Where frayed light bleeds through
Residue of scotch tape
Layers of ice
Evergreens twinned in the current of your voice
Melting purple phlox shards of glass
Whet the eyes colored stones
An altar of space and time
To be the father of our child
Forever
Nathan Hauke is the author of Indian Summer Recycling (forthcoming from The Magnificent Field in 2019), Every Living One (Horse Less Press, 2015), In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes (Publication Studio, 2013), and four chapbooks. His poems have appeared widely in journals, including Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Interim, Typo, 4Ink7: An Unction from the Holy One, and Zen Monster. They have been anthologized in Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012).