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
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