Tag: Natalie Homer

Two Poems by Natalie Homer

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Efflorescence

From the rain-glazed street I can see into a high window
where a papel picado banner spans someone’s apartment:

royal blue repeating in rectangles riddled with cutouts,
like constellation maps backlit with yellow light.

Sometimes this West Virginia town carries the soul
of a much larger city. I feel it most in the greenery

that grows in eddies of brick and cement—
that unexpected flourishing. This week

I received tulips twice, yellow then pink.
More things I won’t be able to keep alive.

Old wounds can always be reopened, it turns out.
I had choices and made them passively.

I’d like to be the color of the sky right now:
purple-gray. Thick with storm. But I would settle

for the pale pink of this potted tulip,
surrounded by paper birds on toothpicks in the soil.

*

Year of the Butterfly

I curated them—Tiger Swallowtails,
pale yellow and sharp-edged,
swarming down a dirt road after a rainstorm;
Silver-spotted Skippers bouncing on the July air
like stones across a lake of shimmering heat;
Pearl Crescents perched on warm rocks,
something erotic in the way they fanned
their burnt-sienna wings, then brought them flush.

In the thrift shop, a blue netted butterfly
clung to the edge of a custard handkerchief,
and I imagined it magicked to life,
little imago lifted on the air currents.
Among the old, water-rippled books:
Butterflies of North America waited for me
with wing diagrams in black ink,
blurred and bolded over time.

I pressed pigments, sunset coppers and pinks,
the shape of forewings, onto my eyelids. Flicked
the liner into the same curve as the black, empty veins.
The moon, I realized, was a Cabbage White all along,
and the roadside flowers—Viceroys.
My old hurt and grudges made a home in me
and I sheltered them, tiny eggs
on the underside of a leaf.

Long after their season was spent,
I caught sight of a few stragglers,
the frantic mating of Clouded Sulphurs
in the tall grasses, already orange with autumn;
Monarchs tossed in the rush of traffic
on their migration south; and a quivering cluster
of delicate feet and probing tongues
on a road-ripped carcass.

*
Natalie Homer’s recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first collection, Under the Broom Tree, is just out from Autumn House Press.

Ash Wednesday by Natalie Homer

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Ash Wednesday

Dull February, and the dry lilac begs to be cut.
Another window of opportunity I’ll recognize and let pass.

This whole winter has been a false spring;
hopeful daffodil leaves test the air with green fingers.

Is the function of the pew kneeler to hurt me
just enough that I wish the prayer to be over?

I accept my smeared gray diadem, my memento mori.
Some messages need no dedications.

I think of the road in the woods
and the bend, the curve like any other

except in this one: mattresses, tires, and trash
piled next to an otherwise scenic creek

cascading over rocks—geometric sheaves of falling water
on its way to a sickly stretch of Monongahela.

Who decided this particular bend in the road
would be the best repository? And who followed suit?

Later, in a different context, an answer comes,
with the reckless confidence that only men have—

That’s the way it’s been done for thousands of years.
Who am I to argue with the millennia?

*

Natalie Homer’s recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first collection, Under the Broom Tree, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press.

Two Poems by Natalie Homer

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Protest in a Small Town

Trucks trailing flags belch by,
stuttering their war cries,
their reds and blues, stars and bars.

When we chant Say her name
those on the other side of the street
drown our voices

and they make sure we can see
their guns, their sources of power,
because they’re afraid

our handmade signs, our impotent
shouts for justice will somehow
destroy our sad little town.

As they cross the street,
and the police let them,
I try not to think

of how easily any one of us
could not make it home.
But who are we to complain?

they ask, and maybe they’re right.
I have no answer, so I look instead
at the planters of bubblegum petunias

that the city maintains each summer,
with such care, the watering trucks
making stops in the cool of the morning

to keep the fragile flowers alive,
even though it’s just for a season.
When our permit expires, and we leave,

the others stay behind, chatting with police,
passing water cups, and congratulating
themselves on keeping the town safe.

In church the next day, I’ll watch
as one of them makes his way to the altar
and kneels on the green carpet,

praying, I’m sure, for this nation he loves
more than anything
to be delivered                to be saved.

*

January
or After Insurrection

Again, men get what they want with little fuss.
Write that fifty times in your best cursive.

Pretty snow gives way to ice,
lights go back into their boxes,
and wilted Poinsettia is thrown away.

Under the giant firs,
Blue Jays sprinkle the sidewalk
with peanut shells.

Most days I drive past one Fuck Biden banner,
a homemade sign that says Build the Wall,
and three thin blue line flags, defiant,

black and blue like a bruise or a body.
I take up a collection for reason’s sake.
The plate comes back nearly empty.

Thousands of miles away, at Big Springs
the rainbow trout beneath the bridge
stay put for good reason

and I wonder how they are doing,
if they are being fed, if steam is lifting
off the river between its powdered banks.

I’m sorry you’ve heard that, someone tells me.
For consolation, I crinkle the library book’s loose laminate
like I did as a child, inhale its slight sour stink.

*
Natalie Homer’s recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first collection, Under the Broom Tree, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press.