August 2023
Bio Note: Last September my full-length collection Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press) was published, and this March my Red Riding Hood chapbook, Our Wolves (Alien Buddha). I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but now live in Phoenix, Arizona, along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. These poems spring from the natural world around me.
Motion
You step outside
to cross the footbridge.
Something rustles underneath,
determined, stymied.
It breaks free.
Mourning doves take flight,
swooping their wings against
the powdery sky.
Quail bobble away as one
rabbit like a hunched
warrior lifts his head
over morning ablutions,
then absconds.
The breeze surrounds you only
to unwrap and follow the birds.
This all happens
in one easy-to-miss instant.
Inside your skin your body
departs with them,
all of you linked together.
Calculating Loss
Birds have the number sense
to know when an egg in a nest
of five goes missing.
If you have four chairs in the kitchen
you don’t have to count
to know
one has been taken away,
to realize one car
cools in the double garage.
Every day the world subtracts from itself and nothing
is immune.
Not these pebbles from our walks along the lakeshore:
pebbles you collected
in this jar which
remains half full,
though for some reason I think of it as overflowing.
©2023 Luanne Castle
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