Glass Poetry Press

editor@glass-poetry.com

Volume Five Issue Two

Paul Nelson

December 21st

Cracked mug, black coffee, chrome yellow egg set on anadama toast. Wine jam smear, bleached china with faded roses, a bent fork … the day the ground stays frozen under sun, and sap dead in roots. We will dig no grave today. Perfect, so I hold like a missed heartbeat, chance to think, day the gate stays open against any wandering out … the sheep, the beef all wrapped for passage in the thick-walled, well resolved Coldspot. Tomorrow, an arthritic inch toward spring, past this blink, this peek past hazardous birth, chink between BC and AD, the John Deere backhoe stalled in the graveyard, a stock-still praying mantis.