By day, I am an 8th grade English and Humanities teacher. By very early morning, I am a poet who works best in the pre-dawn hours because I'm half-asleep by 8 o'clock at night (and thus in no condition to write). My debut poetry collection, The Indifferent World, was published in 2016 by Future Cycle Press, and my second collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, is scheduled for a 2018 release. I blog about my free-verse life at kencraftpoetry.wordpress.com.​

Barnstorming the Universe
 

The big barn must have landed 
overnight, the jolt of its descent
crippling one side so the whole 
structure leans south. The white 
paint, curly from reentry, looks 
foolish as a washed cat. 
The roof, too, shows evidence 
of atmospheric stress, the mottled
landscape of its green top—tar 
paper from missing shingles 
probably scattered from Pittsburgh
to Poughkeepsie—having the look 
of some moody old bass lurking 
in the shallows, scales flaked and 
grated at the speed of light. 
Incredibly, atop the cupola, a rusted 
and outraged weathercock still claws 
the ridge. His wattle and comb hang
sideways, one eye searching for
intergalactic beetles, black-backed
fugitives from Andromeda or the
Crab Nebula. A sliding door is ajar, 
exhaling the stench of stardust, 
of Saturnine ring particulate, of dead
Martians matted on rotted hay. 
In the side window, a single shard 
of glass clings to the sash. If only
the barn could speak of the yawning 
silences, of the teeming nothingness 
that peered inside as it hurtled
its way home to this Maine field.

  

 

Provide, Provide


Clem buttresses that old house
with bales of hay against the foundation,
rivets metal roofing over buckled
tar paper, and feeds his splitter, revealing
the striated blond bellies of halved maple
logs and spewing the fine dust of sweet
wood into his khaki-confettied hair.
As if he sat at Job’s knee as a child,
that old man stacks his wood into a cord,
builds a square meal for his winter stove,
and doesn’t glance up once at the leaden
bottoms of November’s indifferent clouds.