But he wasn’t president, just a racist old relative with appalling fashion sense, and everyone else was pretending he didn’t exist.
Author: Dave Bonta
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. My books of poetry include FAILED STATE: HAIBUN, ICE MOUNTAIN: AN ELEGY, BREAKDOWN: BANJO POEMS, and ODES TO TOOLS.
college town
even the old motel
is younger than me
In a dream, I ask advice on raising children
and am told to bury them in the yard so they’ll ripen.
Every autumn
I’m impressed anew by the sheer inventiveness of death.
I dreamed a giant silk moth fluttered into a museum
and joined its life-like relatives on the wall.
I dreamed I’d written a book about all my disguises.
When I woke up, it was true.
The rain comes hammering on the plush roof of the earth.
on the plush roof of the earth. After a while, it opens one by one its mush rooms.
Four months away
even the full moon isn’t
where I left it
I place myself
on the Underground map uneasily, wondering how such ideal points and lines can add up to anything resembling the surface.
Bronze Age
I dreamed myself adrift in a forest of the dead.
bronze Gandhi
patina sending tendrils
toward the earth
Do the inhabitants of the past ever tire
of our clueless questions and our rapacious gaze?
