Excuses Being Considered . . .

Excuses Being Considered When Not Writing a Poem

by Lisa Cihlar

The toilet needs cleaning,

cleanser is on the shopping list.

The sheets need washing—

they smell like one night too many.

My husband is still wrapped

in them, rubbing his winter dry feet

together like a sandpaper cricket.

The grocery list looks like this:

birdseed (it has been a hard winter)

cleanser (aforementioned toilet)

kitty litter (the slut cat’s in heat and wakes me in the night, yowling)

limes, chicken, tortillas, red and green peppers, cilantro, shredded cheese (a dinner of fajitas)

coconut cake (reminds me of my childhood)

Clementines (still in season?)  maybe bananas?

How can I write a poem

when I have never found an arrowhead?

I have dug up toads, wireworms, pale grubs,

red spider mites like tiny drops of velvet blood.

I have husked sweet corn, found a caterpillar still chewing,

and cut it out, but I can’t put that cob

on my plate, so it goes to the person

who wasn’t there to help with peeling

and silk brushing.

The poems I inherited from my grandmother:

a shadowbox of dead butterflies,

a catalog filled with pressed flowers,

a chinoise.

On the news today they report

more than a thousand World War II veterans die every day.

I don’t know a single one to name

in a poem.

~ first published in The Rat’s Ass Review

Backyard Pond, Brocaded Carp

Backyard Pond, Brocaded Carp 

by Lisa J. Cihlar

My daily yard and garden tour.  I carry fish pellets to the pond.  My largest gold and black koi has died.  The local raccoon got others by feeling behind rocks and in crevasses with paws that look like tiny desiccated human hands.  He didn’t get this one.  I know because there are no half-eaten fish parts scattered in the grass.  This fish just died, old age, some fish disease that I can’t fathom. 

It floats on the surface now, half-sheltered by a water-lily leaf, almost mistaken for a flower-bud.  I scoop the body up in my hand, feel the roll of maggots under scales.  I recoil, send it back into the water and the dozen living carp of many colors come to feast on the larvae, a free-floating meteor shower.

Grant Park Jazz Gala

dragonflies swirl up, over

improvisation

~ first published in Frogpond Journal

ASEMIC

Asemic
by Lisa Cihlar

Birds begin writing secret messages
in the autumn. I watch out the window
as the starlings start to spell their stories
in the air, swing to and fro and flash black
to silver. Cuneiform I suppose, or some
Asian script I cannot read.

At the pet store I want to buy an African
grey parrot with a perfect scarlet tail,
but the clerk tells me he is a mean one,
destructive too, chewing anything he
can reach through the cage of bars.
Maybe I would like the blue Macaw
with its lemon colored belly that laughs
out at odd moments when nothing is funny.

Or a turtle, surely a turtle would fill
my life with some kind of joy. And the Macaw
laughs. Against advice I take home
the African with all the accessories designed
to make him happy. In the cage by the window
he stares at his reflection, refuses to translate
anything the migrators have to tell, engrossed
in how his wings fan. But when cloth covers
the cage at night he begins to whisper things—

Hold this paper up to the light, back to front,
read the cursive left to right. That is all
they are saying. If you can’t understand it now,
try again when they fly next year. The story
may be different then, but there is always
a jungle and storms over the ocean. And fruit.
Crows don’t tell tales you know, too busy
telling the truth, always literal, flying straight.

~ first published in Wisconsin People and Ideas