Two Poems by William Brown

Monarchs

I wanted to dust their beating wings,
douse them in alcohol, press into paper,
onto toothpicks stabbed in foam.
But when I arrive, plastic bag tied
to a stick, they ignite the hush
of alfalfa, pillage the flower’s throats
like boys back home who suck the heads
of crawdads before staking them
on their fingers just to look tough.
Who believed the wasp nest
was a cocoon and awoke it at dusk
by torching with a father’s lighter,
the drone of workers drowning out
the larvae that sizzle like the late sun
breaking through barren trees
to horizon-line fields of alfalfa
where I put my empty bag down and sit,
a vassal before all these orange standards.

 

 

Between Carrollton and Lubbock

I stop at a pasture to watch calves,
too young to fear my hands clenching
alfalfa, chase and play with a tumbleweed.
There’s so many cows I can’t stop
remembering how you’d moo at them
until they mooed back, finger the tags
on their ears like the notch in mine
where a Great Clips hairdresser lost focus.
How you’d trace the brands on their thighs
like you traced the scars on my forehead, knee,
and stomach in bed.
__________________I would’ve stayed longer,
but I began to lose the cows’ bodies
in that dark just before night, enough sun
lingering to hide stars, the final glare
of light on the pond fading to faint
glimmer, then nothing. As the air cools
and night-dew settles on the field, I feel
the familiar chill of sunburn and imagine
you scolding me for not wearing sunscreen
as you cut a frond of aloe you grew
in the window, rub it across my face linger
longer on my scars, and wish me sunburnt
dreams of walking pastures with you.

 

William Brown is a M.A. student in poetry at Texas Tech University whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crab Creek Review, Glass Mountain, and others.