CakewalkThe mint’s taken over
and we just watched it,
eating sandwiches, piled
with fresh tomatoes picked
from the garden.
Love is letting a plant take
over a meticulously tended
bed for a child’s whim.
The tomatoes are gone,
and the mint reminds me
that things used to be
full of everything good.
Written 15 February 2020
Brian Fuchs, “Cakewalk” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Legg-Calvé-Perthes CocoonI’m more reptilian than Russian.
My parts have grown back,
and I’ve shed myself so many times,
expecting somehow to find smaller
versions of myself.
I haven’t grown smaller.
I test my legs often,
waiting for cracks to form
and for the new leg beneath
to emerge, emaciated and pale,
like it was the last time.
I thought I was a butterfly once,
and I fantasized about emerging
beautiful like the people I’m not.
I haven’t emerged beautiful.
Reinvention is either a myth
or a luxury of youth.
I tried so many times,
but I am more like myself now
than I ever was before.
It’s been thirty-five years
since the casts fixed my form
and my legs were allowed
to regrow.
I’m still waiting for it
to happen again,
knowing it won’t,
wishing it would.
I’m not so filled with new versions
as I was before,
and I’ve given up on beauty.
It was alway a lie anyway.
I long to know where
the beautiful people’s cracks form,
and what they expected to become.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Legg-Calvé-Perthes Cocoon” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Scissor-tailed FlycatcherOur hands were calloused once,
the birds would flit in fields,
chasing grasshoppers off perches.
Those fields were plowed
by grandfathers,
by their grandfathers,
tilled by their horses,
and planted with our foods
in an Oklahoma freshly wounded
by wars and broken treaties.
We were busy running from
countries that no longer felt like home,
too busy rebuilding our families
to notice how the soil we dug
had been taken from a people
whose lives had become
defined by their deaths,
a people who never had the luxury
to find themselves too busy to care.
Still, the birds respected us then,
in our collective mourning.
They were here before,
in an uninhabited and hostile land.
They were here when we marched
our shame into this place,
when it was easier to pretend that
some people aren’t worthy of respect.
If they knew the truth,
they never showed it.
I wonder if flycatchers tell the tales,
if they gather to hear about the time
before the fenceposts,
when the fields were filled with
butterflies and grasshoppers.
I wonder if they cast us as the villains,
if they can see who we really are.
I wonder when they learned about us,
when they began to see our cruelty.
They are moving northward,
the fields still full of food,
away from the children
of the children of the children,
too many generations to understand
this place or to love the land,
away from the deceptions,
away from the delusions,
away from the cowardice.
I’m waiting for Spring,
and I’m watching the fields
for the dancing grey birds,
while they still visit us here,
and I wonder what we have learned,
and how much we still lie to ourselves.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Scissor-tailed Flycatcher” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Making Circles in Darknesson the loss of my mother
Sometimes going through the motions
is enough; it’s almost like living.
Sometimes it’s too much effort
to cross the room for heat,
so I watch the snow fall through
the cracked window,
the layers building up
of snow and blankets
as warmth slips out
through the opening.
I’m drunk on my own grief,
and my hand makes lazy circles
in the air to amuse me.
Life doesn’t mean anything;
it never did.
Sometimes there exists in me
a tempest that cannot be contained.
I rebuild and shift things,
furiously dig through the snow
and in the soil,
looking for a place to deposit
the excess energy
and the memories.
Life clings, meaningless
and important.
One day I will forget to feel the pain,
I’ll laugh without stopping myself
and I’ll let the flowers bloom
without shutting myself away
where I cannot see them.
The lazy circles amuse me;
I’m an infant again,
motherless and cold.
Each day feels different,
experienced in ways
I always feared.
I wonder how I’ll remember joy
when it tries to come back in,
and I wonder if I’ll want it
after the years I’ve spent in darkness.
Life clings, heavy
and beautiful.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Making Circles in Darkness” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
for Kevin Davis
We could see you were a dolphin
in your dolphin skin,
but we did not understand
what made you laugh,
and what dolphins do.
We found boxes to put you in,
secondhand and raggedy,
boxes you refused to get in.
You were a dolphin!
Dolphins don’t belong
in boxes.
We were duplicitous cephalopods,
our lives murky black clouds of ink.
But you were a dolphin,
and we couldn’t change
ourselves into anything.
You are still swimming,
singing your dolphin songs
and you are still laughing,
while our withered bodies
lose their ink.
So often, we wish
we were dolphins too.
Written 2 February 2020
Brian Fuchs, “Dolphin” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)Continue Reading