The loft stacked with hay and straw for years now
Drying to shirk the ghost horses
Below in the stone stalls
Where crazed windows fracture sunlight
Or on zero mornings spackle
With ice-hearted apostrophes.
If you remember me, it will be
For the lift of muscles heaving
Sixty pound bales of alfalfa. The slice
Of twine and the flakes fall
Like domino theories. The wind’s mouth
At the high beams where swallows
Hang their teapot domes,
Where mice nest in the golden castles
Of the lost world and I dream in French,
A language I cannot translate.
Today, the red-breasted nuthatch returns
To celebrate November. The pine siskins
Squabble over seed
In a fury of alliteration. Premature snowflakes litter
The air. Nothing sticks.
Bored, we scan the dialog of the quarrelsome
Seeking a mirror in which nothing is reflected.
We cannot speak to each other.
We text with opposable thumbs.
–
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, Gargoyle, Pinyon, Little Patuxent Review, Spillway, Midwestern Gothic, and others. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 22 books, including Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize, and Ribcage (Glass Lyre Press), which was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Three of her poems have been featured on Verse Daily, and another is among the winners of the 2016 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Her newest books are Her Heartsongs (Presa Press) and Joyriding to Nightfall (FutureCycle Press). Colby is a senior editor of FutureCycle Press and an associate editor of Good Works Review.