Wind Whips Through the Cemetery
because there are no trees. I’d abandon
my mother if I could. I’ll vacuum
the torn nails & hair clumps later.
I think that water deer looks nothing
like a vampire hart despite the tuskfangs.
Or because of the tuskfangs it doesn’t
look like a vampire deer as much as it seems
a saddening. I do not conceptually understand
procrastination; if a given task
is completed within a given timeframe
what does it matter at which point within
the parameters completion happens?
I misread print factory as pink factory.
Are there really bats in the library
in Portugal, lording nocturnal over
the books, purging the air of moths and beetles?
Because I should like a whispering winged
swarthy radish devil or two to spirit
over my tomes at night & nestle in the vaulted
by day. What would a nap feel like right now?
I mean, would I dream? I’ve a lot more laundry
to do than I thought, & that’s without stripping
the bed before my wife returns to quell the cotton-
mouth & ease the heart. Why do you think the eye’s
drawn to interpret abstract images in this way?
I talk to my dog more than my mother even
when they’re in the same room. Time feels outside
itself right now, overcast and humid, just a titillation
of stormier weather, this wrist that keeps cracking
when I twist it. I could fraction endlessly.
I’ve been barefoot, my shirt inside out all morning.
And because I hear a crow caw
I notice blue poking from behind
the brightening clouds, the roof speckled
with rain spit. I distract myself; where’d the crow
go? Over which block is it haunting?
I was elsewhere but wasn’t I always elsewhere,
waiting for you? On hands & knees, for you,
I’ll scrub this floor.
LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin, Greenest Grass, and Zoodikers: A Bestiary. In addition, she’s/they’ve co-authored And Scuttle My Balloon with Donna Spruijt-Metz. Conroy is currently working on a series of Ephemeral Altars that celebrate poetry through assemblage art which can be found on her social media sites.