Young Drought
Not a sound from the water,
for once in quiet marshland.
Heron breathes like gardener in his sleep;
eyes on each fish-scale flower.
You’re not a waning moon,
nor an isle of white-washed houses.
Like a leopard lifting prey into the leadwood,
my heart follows you bleeding.
And the leaves wonder why the vermillion rain came so
early.
Arid Nectar
All the bees hum for her
dark hair crowned in globemallow.
Melancholy means nothing in a dry riverbed; ocotillo budding waist high
Lightning on mesa, sparks in the cactus spines
North is where the cottonwood grows,
ribbed trunks; their primal longing for snow in May.
Etched in a canyon, her heart follows her,
without a beat but for water; every being’s drum.
I am not those men on dark horses,
their blood in the waves of red rock.
I only call out to her in the wildflowers,
those sturdy blooms made muted in the heat
She is only a watery blue at sunset, when fire has been stowed away,
kept like a match in the tuft of an owl, whose eyes are the blooms of datura.
Sandstone, salt, and the quiet in a clay jar;
as if it held a whole universe; a low hum of breath in the corner.
Her body bathes in turquoise; juniper blue curves
scrubbed into patinated copper.
All mountains and scrub oak, awash in the hot July rain.
Wait for her voice, they say,
it will drip like honey across a desert and onto the lace wings of
its Maker.
The Forager (To my Mother)
Chicken wire heart
Soft, wild earth; the mosaic keeper dressed in broken glass,
The purple shard bubbling up from the ruins of a farmhouse,
burnt and eaten by the forest.
White blossoms like foam or fog,
ladies in powdered wigs with their lips dyed lemonade
All wonder and wind chimes
metal rusted from extinct railroads;
Beasts of an industrial age now asleep in her garden next to Guadalupe,
her crown of bees.
Pottery decorates delphinium;
a maid in blue held by the skeletons of a grandmother
who bore maize and cactus wine.
Hummingbirds duel, tangier whistles in his bed
as the quiet sphinx moth barely notices the forager’s jewels
among the ballerina primrose; their soft whispers
to fly free.
Chloe Glenn is originally from Arizona and now calls northeast New York my home. She has been writing poems and stories since childhood and is honored to live among and learn from so many great writers in the New York area.
