Jack Boettcher
from Boettcher School for Crippled Children
Wake for breath, a pot of tea.
To wake wanting for thunder.
Your great-grandfather
built the house
so you live enjambed
to history. Not pastoral.
Swath or swell of green
light’s dilute pulse
against the kitchen window
smudged with grease.
Nominal renewal finding form.
____________________________
Heard drawn water’s cycle
cease in the pipes.
Another equinox
come on
with its dried blood breath
its milk wash
unclotting honeysuckle.
The stroke of her thigh
we pinched a tick from the bed.
Watched bruised blooms
peck a slag path.
Jack Boettcher is the author of the chapbooks Surveyic Hero (horse less press, 2007) and The Deviants (Greying Ghost, 2009). His poems and stories are published or forthcoming in The Denver Quarterly, The Diagram, Fence, Indiana Review, La Petite Zine, Pleiades, and several other journals. He lives in Austin, Texas.