January
Tumblers in the night,
cat’s teeth clicking, tongues lapping,
unlocking light’s safe.
Death arrives sans words.
Red blood falls as silently
through the night as snow.
Morning makes the bed,
lofts light sheets and comforters
over still soft night.
Six crows face sunrise;
no wind bends the cottonwood.
What will be revealed?
Adversity or
light aligns direction in
perch, view, quill, spine, down.
Rapids of starlings,
whirlpools of gulls, tides of crows,
shipwrecks of eagles.
Black fishbone branches
hold up cirrus sky flaked flesh
above dispersed light.
I think a possum
lives in the trunk of this tree—
tail trails mark the snow.
Black branch treetops shine
orange gold before blue clouds.
Ducks float in shadow.
February
Steeping draws out life
in tea leaves dry as mummies.
Tender nights wake frogs.
Four robins blush for
I walk beneath them staring
up into bare trees.
From rest the train rolls;
the railroad bridge, its drum; tracks,
grounded cymbals brushed.
February geese
slipper shuffle on dry grass.
The ruffled duck grooms.
Flies like an arrow—
Ardea herodias—
sure to strike its mark.
Twisting stream of crows
under a silver contrail
follows the river.
Dark-eyed Juncos flit.
The train stops and starts again
on the river span.
Squirrel leaps over
snaking mound pocket gopher
raised, soars with his thoughts.
Squirrels run like scarves
pulled through some windy crevice.
Then Child Man runs by.
Without my glasses,
and maybe with, the moon a
sore that will not heal.
March
Starlings weigh nothing,
touch the ground as ritual
ghost fingers obsessed.
Goose rises on legs
capable of carrying
its stillness away.
Across the river,
blushes of orange and green
suddenly famous.
Rhythm of the goose
eating, like waves. Feathers lift.
Back against the wind.
Given the same life,
could I steer more expertly,
having gone before?
Ornamental pear
blossoms weigh down city streets.
The egrets return.
A storm plows away
sexual moist, fermented, rank
fallen petal drifts.
The kingfisher dives
from the branch mainly submerged
midstream, then returns.
Found a cat whisker
in the vacuum yesterday.
Certain things stick out.
Suzanne K. Miller lives in a house built in 1900 and works online. She earned an MFA from Wichita State University. Her work has appeared in Festival Quarterly, First Things, The Mennonite, Mikrokosmos, Plainsongs, Porcupine, and Women of the Plains: Kansas Poetry. Storage Issues, her first book of poems, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010.
