Maureen Alsop

Return Address

Your jaw trembles slightly & the oak tree’s shade
scatters the clay path through the garden
as a drunken goldfinch flutters & spins
across the lawn. Did you remember

the two of us walking the field
as the sky squared into dust—strange
blossoms fell; your body’s speech
glistening.  You arrive
at the hospital like some injured bird
swaddled in a towel.    The turnstile room is a box 
punched with airholes,
unslowed by the grit and frazzle of florescent hallways
& light gathering your lungs…

you find nothing—
not the empty town
or those midnight conversations
which rose into the rafters 

behind mudlake eyes  the door
to a stranger’s house    And you, traveler

whose blood is drawn, will go
underground as a photograph
of unanswerable questions

Do the birds tonight

sound like quake or solstice.

The Twitch of a Caledonia Landscape

Cold, the first drift
in the windowless barn
mimics a brief tremble of dust
over the pasture.  Your wet hand
passes over her flank for hours
without injury or illumination.  Stacks

of hay frame your thoughts—
the known ahead remains
unmapped.  You are impossible.

She paces. At his pivot

into equinox beauty seems limitless.  A pool
of blood in the grass—a circle of clover’s
flat glittering—is the soil’s matriculation
of afterbirth.  Now a crosswind rustles

the sun as the orange snuff of the horizon
bows upward.  Belief in the visual field he is a splutter
of eyelash; she laps figure eights over his still
steaming ear.  Softly, softly

a slackening gold in his iris

Insomniac Confesses from the Solarium (pdf; click to view)

Maureen Alsop's poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including: The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Typo, Columbia : A Journal of Literature and Art and Texas Review.  Her poetry was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  She is also the recipient of Harpur Palate's 2007 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and Bitter Oleander’s 2007 Frances Locke Memorial Award for Poetry.  Her first full collection of poetry, Apparition Wren, was published in December 2007..