the night is large tonight
ants mistake our legs
for old fallen branches
& simply crawl
without violence
I tell you that a poem
is a gasp of words
like my breath on your cheek
& that everything before you
has been a febrile haze
now
even the creek is falling asleep
its languid water
tinged a brooding red by tannins
from fallen pine needles
so Biblical, I say
so natural, you reply
I wish I could be taller
that I could gather up the stars
& string them
in your eyelashes
but who has hands
to reorder the sky?
all my hands can do
is hold yours
you look at me
not at my eyes
but through them
a coyote yips & yowls
into the open ear of the world
sound of change
song of my fever lifting
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for Gulf Stream. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK, Literary Orphans, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for Gulf Stream. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK, Literary Orphans, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.