Duck
Economies
technically
i’m so inferior
binocularsexpensive for me
still under $five hundred
scope only
child’s toy
—reward
for thirty-five-years teaching
so i
mostly
with frozen
hands watery eyesguess
at beak color
wing tip
ringed neck
know regal shapes of canvasbacks
can tell horns and clarinets of tundra swans
when home
i googlethinking luminous close-ups
will vivify
my fading visual snaps
among the photos
of these serenes—illusionists on lake skin—
one microsecond caught in lenses’ round
next arching
vanished as if they’d never been
i see shots
of children
triumphanthigh-tech guns slung over shoulders
holding aloft
dogs’s jaws clamped on
lifeless bodies
see carcasses
accompaniedby game cooking tips
This
Mid-September Day
swollen with
rain-to-be
stands so
very still
canes of
raspberries sway
with weight
of bumblebeessucking at late flowers
globes on the
fuchsia that
fatigued in summer
heatheld itself barren
impossibly hotpink
pregnant look on
to bursts of purple frills
hydrangea
blooms long past
their
primenow move to green
unripening
as if to tell us
despite crickets’ vibrato
nests of yellow in the linden trees
there’ll be another
spring
Once in
Seven Billion
on the grass
median a modest family
Canada geese
and two offspring
the gander
did check out the coming car
could not conceive anything would move at such a
speed
we on the
other side horror-struck
forgot about
the changing traffic light
watched as he
herded his mate and goslings
into three
lanes of fast-approaching cars
and then it
happened
the first car
stopped then another and another
for once some
humans making up
our crimes of
paving over other lives
stupid male got his small family
across to
another grassy berm
all our machines took off
some drivers
giving others the thumbs up
Anca Vlasopolos published the award-winning novel The New Bedford
Samurai, the award-winning memoir No Return Address:
A Memoir of Displacement, two
collections of poems, Walking Toward
Solstice and Penguins in a Warming World, three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel,
Missing Members, and over two hundred poems and short
stories. She was nominated several times for the Pushcart Award in poetry and
fiction. She is associate editor of Corridors Magazine.
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