I always seem to have tickets
in the third or fourth balcony
(a perch for irony;
a circle of hell the Brits
tend to call ‘The Gods’),
and peer down from a tier
of that empyrean
Tasmania: fragments from a story
THE MAN
The Governor built his prisons,
but he built his chapels, too.
Now the Lamb of God beams down
in light that’s brightly stained,
right foreleg implausibly curled
around a regimental flag.
All day those stones have writhed with myth,
roots have snaked necks, have had the cheek
to prod gods and kings, crack armies, cities, ships;
mocked Shiva, made him sprout arthritic wrists.
By DON SHARE
Rabbit fur and hair strewn through the lawns
of the Midwest!
The famous feral parakeets of Chicago
are chattering
With cold.
By DON SHARE
I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
By DON SHARE
Hobo, Bono, boneheap.
I mutilate dandelions in the sun,
rattle my rake like a saber
When Michelle-my-neighbor,
over compost, opines
that Aqualung’s a classic
I took three stones from there:
one from the water
one from the sun
and a small one
to grow.
The puzzle of the sun’s longing for
the sea
The marvel: her love fills the sky overflows the rim till the
sea is one
with the sky
By L. S. KLATT
I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to
The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole.
Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps
in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave
as the GTO convertible wheels out of its tomb, the driveway
chartreuse with maple wings. Tell White I’ll cut some garlic
in his mother’s garden; I’ll wear a rhinestone button-down
studded with garnets. Finger the fretboard with licks
& withdrawals. And toe-tap the pedal
if I don’t screw up again. If I don’t give up listening
to the leafing of lettuces. Won’t be long
before I could care less.
L. S. KLATT’s poems have appeared widely: The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Believer, Image, VOLT, The Southern Review, and Pleiades. He is the author of five collections, including Cloud of Ink, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and most recently Saint with a Peacock Voice.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being
lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.