Thrush Poetry Journal
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Dana Koster

Trigger Words

Maggie tells me creativity

is the sign of an unquiet mind.

Likewise insomnia, likewise

hopelessness. Excessive happiness. 

Great productivity. No

productivity. 

 
Tonight’s Lunar Eclipse shines in your 9th House

of Higher Truth – share the glow

with as many people as possible. 

Men, women, birds. 

Fuck them all.

 
Likewise irritability. 

Likewise denial.




Grandiosity

Dear peasants, say

you knew my benevolence.

That I saved you

oxtail, helped myself only

to the barest of marrow.

Allowed you to suck it clean

when I was done.


It’s true I’ve mounted

the cloud cities

and found them wanting –

Laputa, that floating trash vortex –

I have unmade its castle with my breath.

 
The West Wind said I’m so good at blowing

that he gave up. I’ll gust

the hottest dust devils

as stiffly as I please.




Comorbidity

I might be half a hummingbird,

Maggie. I might be a lot of things.

I do love to tongue the soft insides

of flowers. You could describe me

as nature’s hypodermic needle.

That would be fair. 

 
I’ve known their torpor, too.

Have longed to drift from my body

as it lay dormant on the bed.

 
No. It’s not

that I wished to die.

It’s that the thought of dying

no longer concerned me.


Or perhaps the woman and the bird

are comorbid, comingling.

Don’t pretend

you can spot the difference.




Dana Koster was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a 2012 recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, Phantom Limb, PN Review and EPOCH, among others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.




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