F. Daniel Rziczneck
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Here I am dropping in, arriving cold
I waste my wakefulness in the garden
I thought, joy—here maybe just a bit
Doing nothing but watching the ants
Their endless mazes of particulates
The certain in-and-out of the structures
Distilled by morning, into the house
A goading power in the north breeze
Tossing around in there all night then
A shuffling of leaves and of months
A crystal of sand under my left eyelid
I am the friend who drops in on myself
A mindlessness behind this sleeplessness
Leaves the garbage can overturned
Lets the dogs at the chicken bones
Pigeons scooting across the shingles
Still flying the town in family groups
Young of the year, before open season
I like best the decisions made for me
Algae Bloom
I made ends meet as a skip tracer
They paid me in personalized insults
He was gone like water over a falls
From what I knew he was my father
Buying flowers at a market in the rain
I wondered what the deer at night
Thought of their dead hanging out back
Snapping the ends of a thousand beans
Did they think to approach, to smell
Did they know previously, then recognize
A simmering halo at the shed’s edge
The baby rabbit is much too slow
He twists himself in too many ways
So many semblances of the originative I
Satanic beetles on the milkweed pods
One truck forcing another off the road
I spent the day eating only peppers, asking
What’s going on behind these bones
And where did all of my blood just go
High Heaven
The broken ladder to a loose window
To an overhang in the criminal rain
A few things even the locals don’t know
Boreal phantoms lungless in the canopy
And later an impulse under the bridge
I was standoffish and then just reticent
I was the first few thick drops as they fell
A laze disregarding the yard for decades
Wearing last season’s candidate’s shirt
The day plain, sidereal, or so it seemed
A fleeing down the otherwise empty road
The idea of country only as a remove
Or even worse, a kind of fortified solace
Lost on those who actually live there
Ex-hornets floating in the sugar water
I get a little nauseous from the cicadas
Pipe-reek, weeks of resin under his nails
Trailing like a cellar dragged up and out
Into the dusk’s long puddles of light
F. Daniel Rzicznek is the author of two poetry collections, Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2009) and Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007), as well as four chapbooks, most recently Live Feeds (Epiphany Editions, 2015). He is coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, TYPO, Notre Dame Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Rzicznek teaches writing at Bowling Green State University.