Keith Woodruff

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Living Raft

In diamond formation, jets flew over my mornings, my coffees. The days.
Over baseball, my posse of hens nit picking the dirt, my chill dog in the
grass belly up, sunning. Flew over my nights, moonlit roofs, my star-drunk
dreaming chimney. Some rained down Whitehouse merch like milt: grey
steaks, cologne and coins.

In finger-four, they fly over fist pumps deployed from pickup windows,
pickups with dangling flesh tone nut sacs, and bumper stickers that chide
FUCK MY FEELINGS, that say: one minute, two men clinging to boat
debris are there, then a flash and they evaporate on the screen.

In vulture formation, they’ll fly over drained schools, empty playgrounds,
over homes burning like campfires and coated crowds gathered around the
generous and giving flames to warm their hands.

This morning, after last night’s rain, I find a cluster of red ants stranded in a
murky pool of water. This is where it starts. Where it always starts. They
have made a living raft of their bodies, as they always do, to stay afloat.

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Empire Down

In floral shops, white roses sigh, wonder how,
foamy Aphrodite and all, red means Love
and not them. They’re disenfranchised,
color’s broken. Once, a polar bear on Prozac
turned purple. Weather is down to the bone.
Hundreds of tadpoles, gasping, forced to the center
of a shrinking pool—all those white bellies a writhing,
thick as mud on mud. The heat of our indifference.
In the pear tree, pie tins flash fishsilver in moonlight.
The porch screen is festooned with June bugs,
drunk with love for my light. I begin my prayer
against the end, type I wish … though that
is the sound we make when falling.

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HAIKU

*
they fight to keep
minimum wage minimum
I think of Basho’s cormorants

*
my paperboy
is a man
how hard it hits

*
blankets stashed
under a park bush
first signs of spring

*
by the river
tent city kids
feed the ducks

*
dark sky preserve
the part of me
that remembers

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Banner Art:
Photo by Dan Parlante, Unsplash, 2020