Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Unregenerate Pastoral
Star thistle, milk vetch,
crooked salt licks by
the fence posts. Silk-
worms levitate: a maze
-like splendor over
slender grasses. Black
flies testing the horse
pond. Buckled shards
of the lightning-struck
tree limbs metastasize
fodder for the lobster
mushrooms. This late
spring day flesh has been
invented for. Now every
clover along the lawn’s
its own thick centerfold
in a honeybee magazine.
Tick season; barb wire.
This carbuncle of cow
knuckle. Muck slough.
Chicken bones. Cracked
robins’ eggs; nest stuff.
Old beaters on cement
blocks. Liquor bottles
smashed on blacktop.
I’ll cop to the lewd and
ugly in it. More brownish
precipitates that darken
down the river’s scum
sumptuous with phosphates.
Dead roots. Good taste
should not be wasted
making art. Just step out
of the way, and beauty
does its thing. It might care
less who sticks around.
Will Cordeiro’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Recipient of a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he co-edits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico. (updated 4/2020)