NEW! 2 poems by Michael Rutherglen

Michael Rutherglen


APPALACHIAN SALMACIS

A smalt-clotted, sedgeless depth.
Slap through the surface to surface

tinted by something other
than steady, adusting daylight:

bedrock-solace,
calm beyond storms:

a cold prehensile
as a nymph’s blue limbs.

Flail in to wade out
as you would out of dream,

silted with, grafted to a shade at strata
you had not known you had,

head cloudless, body
tremoring with balm.


TO A DOGSTAR

A fistful of tinder,
a shot glass of sugar
light-sic’d at the center
of a shorn plain.

Or my hands come to flicker
like raw birds before me
in an all-anulling noon,

the day blazed to one
void, the constellation come
down to weld the hours.