Thrush Poetry Journal
  • ABOUT
  • ARCHIVES
  • JANUARY 2023
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • AWARDS
  • MASTHEAD

Michael Bazzett

Dirt

In the gnawed cotton elbows of this shirt nest a handful of voles and spiders 

have bit my ankles into bumps: this sleep lasted for weeks and even now

I have only one eye slitted awake enough to sense the cool breeze polishing

my shinbones. This keeps me from slipping back into dream-swamp. My spine

is a crimped pearl necklace. A lantern burns inside my skull. I learned to speak

starlight while I was away: a song spinning through space for nine million years.

Astronomers are merely paleontologists of light. Don’t taunt me with the absurd

proximity of the sun. I will eat nothing for breakfast until I sing as the volcano

choirs once sang in the dream of the gods. So, no breakfast I guess. For now just

coffee and contemplation of those spiders tapping into the warm mountain of me.





Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, 32 Poems and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).





Return to May 2015 Edition