By: D A Angelo

Merriment 

Sometimes it’s good to walk in the countryside to watch a merry-go-round of clouds while the sky shifts to a warm glow. Sometimes it’s good to watch hares pose like National Geographic models in a wheat field. Sometimes it’s good to watch a fox pause, eyes bright like the moon, when you’ve caught it rummaging through the bins like a paparazzi after a scoop. Sometimes it’s good to watch a clock of swifts. Sometimes it’s good to watch the stillness of deer. Sometimes it’s good to sit by a pond and let everything spill out until there’s nothing but joy floating to the surface. 

Notes on September 

A Victoria sponge of a month: summer is the top layer, autumn is the bottom. Sandwiched in the middle are your desires ripening like blackberries, the last of the blossoms perfuming the moment. How you’ll blackbird out your wants before the month is gone, how your mouth will be fat with goods for a winter stockroom; the last of summer’s light pale and squirming like love caught in the closing fist of a heart; you close to me.

Signs of a good day 

The bathroom sink professes loyalty and actually drains for once. The microwave chimes hello. Every bill hasn’t marked me for death. Houseplants stop swearing behind my back. The neighbour’s cat doesn’t arch into a McDonald’s m every time I’m nearby. Clouds don’t spit on their knuckles and prepare for a fight. The plane trees don’t pelt me with their seed balls. The sky isn’t an illusion. The coffee is fine. The water is just water. My heart doesn’t leap into a chasm every time you text. 

Mussels 

The mussels in the pan
are screaming children 
screaming for the ocean
look how they open
like bird chicks for a regurgitated 
taste of the sea
for a regurgitated taste
of the sky 
for a regurgitated taste 
of the horizon 

Who are we 
to take away their mythology?

We are no gods
obsidian as the worthless shells 
tossed like trinkets to the gulls.

Self portrait as a snail

And I quietly dissolve 
into the Bovril night. 
And I quietly dissolve 
the quiet march of clouds
across the sky. And I quietly
dissolve myself in the pastoral
pleasantries of the back 
garden. And I quietly dissolve 
the hours with every ampersand 
I make. And I quietly dissolve 
every expectation with my grandiose 
shadow, the wrecking ball 
of a boomerang voice removing 
the humility. And I quietly dissolve 
the polyphonic chorus of the Milky Way 
with the most ordinary of shells.