two poems by kerry trautman

road

Conveyance

(after “The Road from Market” oil on canvas, by Thomas Gainsborough)

She glows the dark woodpath,

sidesaddle ankles dangling,

and men bring her gifts of

wildflowers, mead,

embroidered cloths commissioned of their sisters.

Musculature below her body

heaves her taffeta ahead

down men’s worn mudpath.

Flattened here in grey winter Midwest,

it seems fable there ever would have been horses

to drape our bodies on

for conveyance—

those hides our only means toward

lovers afar, toward sisters carried

away on hideback to lovers’ stone walls.

She leaves her climbed tree limbs behind, and

sister night whispers,

and mother’s cakes and skirt folds.

Girlhood breadcrumbs fading in trails

with horse plop.

She would never believe there are

locomotives now, and cars,

that ladies’ legs can straddle wide horsebacks or

fly Delta to Tijuana.

Our new flatlands melt open wide—

horizon enough to hide ourselves in furred

animals, cotton knits, damp taxicabs with

cracked vinyl pricking backs of bared thighs.

In mossdark smut, tree bark and horse sweat smell

it is fable to her alabaster neck that

she need not be carried by anything broader than

her two legs.

A Mezcal Toast

Like a long-nosed bat

tongue ribboned into

cupped agave blossoms

I’ve wasted my faith thinking

your only means of pollination

was my wingless hover.

I sip this tequila now, its breath

of char lugging resistant

bitterness behind like a housefire

like a chimney caved-in

brick by grayblack brick in a puff

of creosote and bird bones.

To you, this lime and smoked

nectar like a sip of Iceland’s

cold upon volcanic cold

and to Leptonycteris shitting

upside-down in a cave craving

the only flower its ever known.

A lifetime Ohioan, Kerry Trautman is a founder of ToledoPoet.com and the “Toledo Poetry Museum” page on Facebook, which promote Northwest Ohio poetry events. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Slippery Elm, Free State Review, Thimble, The Fourth River, Alimentum, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Kerry’s poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.)

North of Oxford

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two poems by kerry trautman

Two Poems by Kerry Trautman