Here In My Unincorporated Plot
BY MARY SPOONER
I fashion a man from plastic
with rubber boots and spurs.
His arm goes all the way around
in its socket. His hat never falls off.
I tell him: I’ve been a woman
folded down the center.
I’ve been a glass of beer.
I hold my fingers and thumb
like a pistol between my legs.
What do you make of this?
He says: Admit
you have grown tired of your exile,
have wanted both property
and deliverance from property,
a vista so open
you could outwalk yourself.
Do not lie, I say. I made you
so I could practice loving you.
You made me so
you can take my boots off.
You take them off
to put them on again.
Mitigation
BY MARY SPOONER
Today, you learn of wetland banking
and imagine a wetland banker whose job
it is to balance the scales. The fish skimming
the marsh’s soft bottom, the egret’s hairpin
legs wading, unaware all loss is netted.
You watch the present like a birder
through the objective lens,
tracking it abreast. A hunter leads
the bird, aiming where it is headed.
There is death and there is Death
of long ago, someone you might meet with
in an old stone city, charming and alive
as anyone, so you do not die alone
but in Death’s company. A watershed moment asks
you to contemplate your usefulness. Your sentence
and the precarity of it breaking, reconstituting
like a river through a winter valley, white and blinding.
Today, a neighbor boy runs half-naked into a bank
of snow. For a moment, the earth
is soft and free of imprint.
Holding Pattern
BY MARY SPOONER
We both want to do it, but we don’t want to do it
to one another. This, our old language
of infliction.
We are honest, honest as two people can be
and not make a religion of it.
Yet we shy from a doorway
where we once begged.
Five years in cold country and now
pomelo trees. A garden plot
pacing dogs trampled bare.
Here, we are digging a trench
so the rain, when it comes, goes where we want
instead of sheeting across the exhausted
ground, flooding the lower bungalows.
What happens when your body,
and we agreed only the body
as if this clean divorce is plausible,
leaves its containment?
Are we betting a bounty on the chance
of a little more?
Our neighbors suggest leatherleaf fern
and yarrow. They show us how to plant
into the side of the trench to prevent erosion.
We wipe our faces with soiled gloves and laugh
like an advertisement for good neighbors.
I’m on my knees. Can you see me
opening, the capaciousness of my season?
Outside the city, fires
raze the mountains naked.
Between Us
BY MARY SPOONER
Something has flipped on itself like the stomach of a barrel-chested animal.
You suffered, and I was miles away.
We once shared a blue house on a loud street where every cat was named George.
We each learned to love women.
In my world, words fall in and out of favor.
Recently, carapace. Inextricable, the outer chitinous life.
Sometimes the horror is the end of it.
Nothing coming, head slung low beneath the withers, to sniff you out.
A clutch of days without contour. Then, the falcon in the clock tower lays another egg.
The city waits to see if it will hatch, and if it does hatch, if she will eat it again.
Sometimes the horror is the horror.
I can offer only my hard surfaces. Me the whetstone, you the blade.
