Lesle Lewis

April

My afternoons are either poet cats or girl poets. Once a month, they’re adolescent girl cats modernistic. They catch moods with nets. They jump out of their minds, like fish out of pond water, for things to eat. They have zoom which doesn’t mean there isn’t obstacle after obstacle to their progressing. They are not good listeners. They thought we were saying the candy machine on the third floor was broken, but we were saying our girlfriends have left us and our hearts are broken. We beat our hearts. Coffee can only do so much but it does so much. Supposers sniff and run around our houses. We are melting off our ponds. We are baby woodpeckers. If I sit on Graves Pond in my boat in the cattails, it’s a fact of temporality.

A pair of mallards owns the pond and a pair of Canadian geese and a pair of otters and a pair of tires and a thousand painted turtles. They’re all at least a little mad at me. My lessons don’t seem to accumulate. Nothing will do for me but a hey from you. You called with condolences and planting advice. We did six stanzas slowly and it was good for us. We saw fox and moose and toads and mice. In our DayGlo jewelry, we danced in the dark bathroom and it was a kind of happiness we were having.