Poetry
Haven, a Half-Mile In
By Justin Wymer
The woods’ green
slurs under rain:
dart & break &
fecklessness.
So nourishment feeds
a kind of collapse.
Trees rasp. Water
rashes bark, splits
pulp into chit.
I want to break
into ends
of blossoms
which fail—
scales
slough in
offering
to the ground’s
damp mantle.
Tears
droop upward
in trunks:
methodical
pity—for my
being soft
in the center
headed nowhere
sharply inward.
Pollen
lacquers wind
like gossip.
The wild vein in my
left hand
could get
caught, hook
on the smell of sour
cinnamon
and bind me
here, in my inconstant
constancy, a wood
away from
home
and the boy
who lives there
supping on
his shadow.
O Brother
By Justin Wymer
Beehive that lightning split: a bad translation of brotherhood. Mom used to always say that bolt that hit the poplar out back and twisted it, the top hanging down like a snapped wrist exposed to air, resembled her.
All around the yard were bullet casings, cracked car parts, angels buried to the breast in mud and ash from bowls you cashed. You and I had to move the old freezer, retch at the 3-month-old deer meat the devil threw in the yard after he didn’t pay the power bill. This was before he shot you, not at you but past, beside the paint-by-numbers angel Mom framed from me, into the wall bleared with menthol smoke and complicity.
You said well your lips are real big and I said so your hair looks like a peninsula.
If love’s my utterance, it’s unwell. A chemical breeze blows west from the plant on the Kanawha.
Survival Advice for Lily Bees
By Justin Wymer
Crawl at dusk into a dahlia
whose blushed beds are
closing. Shake loose its powder
so your wanting’s outward, felt.
In my garden your body’s no
cosmic error. The stake
ripped from my back is silver
but less clear, like a jewel
mangled but not mentioning it.
Justin Wymer
Justin Wymer is a writer and educator from West Virginia. He is the author of the collections Let the Forest Go and DEED. He has been honored by the Harvard Office for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, the University of Iowa, and the Academy of American Poets. Find him online at justinwymer.com.