By Emily Corwin
photo: Emily Corwin
January 1
Shocks of pampas grass wrapped like pigtails.
Oyster mushrooms, fully-intact October pumpkins,
Corn-cobs in the gutter. A gossamer sheet over the
house’s incomplete body. All the residents packed
around plasma between two plates of glass: Rose
Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Citrus Bowl.
January 3
Who hacked away the coneflowers, the lupine and chicory? Field blank as a lake bed. It’s all groggy, brown and bister. Box elder buckled and disfigured, marrows disclosed like
private crinolines. A crust of frost: forgotten clotted cream. The cabbage head left behind in pieces, unswept and pallid: Grandmother’s cereal bowl.
January 7
They distribute the rock salt in circlets: a countermagic.
A cold-ass gob of rose quartz like calcified brain matter.
Trellises. Dalmatian stone and Pelligrino bottle smithereens. Dog violet, beheaded. Window poinsettia and hedge-apple wasted dark to a charcoal briquette.
January 10
Sterile gloves gossamer as chapel veils.
The gingko—the maidenhair tree—
molders like expired soft cheeses. I wish
for a balaclava and a Girl Scout cookie.
The felling of a front-yard hemlock:
bifurcated like an autopsy.
He definitely looks like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be afraid of the highway
January 21
Down Windermere, towards Aldana’s: “Tequila
and Mezcal”. Woodsmoke, laundry smog, popcorn
butter and the Lions versus the Buccaneers. Birthday
banner in a picture window and Buzz Lightyear.
I dreamed my ex-boyfriend in the afternoon
and we lived together in the dorms. He put
a moon in my woods: ovoid like a sepal, and
dappled too. How did I not know that our
house was painted gray? The ice groans in
sheets, clods and rubble: plate tectonics.
January 28
The gargoyle with lion jowl: supine in the garden, boxwood and spattered snow mounds. Octogonal window and spider plant. Gambrel roof and boys in red anoraks, their mother hoisting wine for
Sunday night football. I bought a brie-apple
croissant and an almond one too– tender breads.
February 7
Six-pound salt lick: pink Himalayan salt for white-tailed deer. Plasticine church in the fairy garden: its Protestant steeple. Mulberry and felled coneflowers, fallow. Gray-ish leaves, diaphanous like bat wings, amputated. I am spoiled in sunshine: a false spring. The chip trail behind the lavender mansion, ovoid stones in the Rouge River. Winter reorganizes: everything corpse-like. Cherry-pickers on the corners, navel orange peeled, dangled and held by a branch: ornament.
February 11
Warm enough for bicycles and horseflies.
A pack of wild turkeys and empty brandy.
Tenhave Woods: the Goodwin trail, oblong
hollows. A search party? People comb the
woods, eyes down in undergrowth: a lost
earring or animal? Beside the Bitternut
Hickory: two speckled mittens. Well,
someone, they put them down when taking
a picture, I suppose.
February 18
The arboretum is nothing but a backyard, a strip of pin oaks And black cherry, water condensed into dappled window: a picture of earth, disrupted mud.
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