Marcel Brouwers

The Stone Bench


It’s not enough the neighbor cat climbs it,
or pauses. If I thought to lay out milk,
we’d be friends. But for the poured concrete

my yard is of the lush rest of growth,
wisteria and the choking grape, the late

surprise-lily erupting like night lava from space,

kudzu, a word reminding me of war words,
fubar, which it is. & the like. & is how
we know seasons. Which explains

the possum ignoring mute hummingbirds
slurping the Rose of Sharon dry, wingbeats
a blur, this world not helping but be close,

​the soft silent whisper of teeth & nails.
​

Seasonal Affective Disorder

                                          
The twenty-fifth of the first month was the last snow
to fall for the next seventy odd years. The mayors
& clerks looked up to revise the world’s history
to a legend of cold hope to catch unawares
the too much to do forever: boiling men
out of their glaciers for quizzes, crosswords,
lobbing grapefruits while honing lost friends,
skiing on bones of bears, using herringbones
to turn under the overhang of aspens
careening to the bottom in all that friction.
The incline of those days was back and forth.
Everyone swung their time to other hobbies,
teeter-totters in the gray playground and cells
ringing across the cosmos. All the jackets
got hung up on hat racks. Flip flops became
the rage, from woven grass to neon platform.
Because the season bore no sign post &
calendars shifted according to the politics
of whim, every kind of –crat & –ist sat by
as the moon took up its position on the sea.
Call them clouds of what’s flown by and say
that next year the mouth of the universe will be
in a quiet child on a shady foot path. See
if then its yawn is not enough to warrant
some yellow grin in the coming of alien suns.

La Scala Busker


Two strains
of violin
interlope
against fans

of ash leaves,
the blue night
turning to
root, to up,

to the heart’s
penultimate
beat and that
withheld in

definitely,
resolution
the natural
resonant. 

I can’t not
envelop
the world
but the unlikely

abounds





--
Marcel Brouwers lives and works in Knoxville, TN. His chapbook, The Rose Industrial Complex, was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. He has had poems published in Kestrel, DIAGRAM, Pebble Lake Review, The Chariton Review, Pisgah Review, and others.