by Patricia Caspers

by Patricia Caspers

(Here I am where are you?)

for Kristen and Lee Anne

Into this silence
I want to howl
Mariah Carey lyrics,
inhale 80s sitcoms
with each deep pull
of clovesmoke,
sweat rum
into couch seams.

Instead, the canyon
beyond the TV screen
is sobering pink stormlight.

Turkeys wander
the garden,
their bronze feathers
shimmer rainbows
and fall to August-
yellowed grass.

Flocks roam the neighborhood
seed-scouring the earth,
unconcerned with the romance
of October twilight.

I wake to the turklets’
three-note whistle-and-yelp
in the starless night.

They scurry the fence line
in search of a path
long buried with foliage
of other autumns.

There’s no word
for the hunter’s practice
of calling a hen to his shotgun
with the cry of her lost poult.

There is no word
for what we are now.

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Patricia Caspers is an award-winning poet, columnist and journalist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, PANK, The Cortland Review, Sugar House Review, and Quiddity. She won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, and her full-length poetry collection, In the Belly of the Albatross, was published by Glass Lyre Press.