Humor Me

Glazy morning, pale through the eyelids. Sleeping In the brush with the last of the dew. Thin wheatgrass. Sage. The creek is a slender thing running Along the bottom of the valley.

It’s like a movie. Like we rehearsed it. I am waiting till the tap on my chest So that when I open my eyes the deer will have Already assumed its place. And I’ll put my palms over each ear just As the trigger collapses under your finger.

You Had a green apple before I went to sleep. I had a handful of Peanuts.

Now my eyes are open and the memory warps And the deer begins To double and flicker. Something out of touch with its own reality. It stutters and jumps. It shifts. It is a lodgepole pine. It is Sister Strange with A froglet in her hands. It is a bison With its hoof on your chest.

2/2 Joe Rawle, Third Place

It is all stretching And thinning like an unravelling thread. When it stops I am Pissing in a grove of aspen Whose roots blanket and stretch the meadow, And the meadow after that.