Issue 17 – Winter 2010 – Jack Boettcher

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 QuarterlyThe Diagram, FenceIndiana Review, La Petite Zine, Pleiades, and several other journals. He lives in Austin, Texas.

 

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