5 Poems by Jami Macarty

Same Season

The sower's hand empty: no birdsong.

Watching for the cardinal: I wait

as long as I wait

for you to change.

The slick blackbirds

stretched above the sun

land atop the tallest pine: too far

to see the blue in their feathers.

  Originally published in Golden Handcuffs Review

Dedication to Subtraction

                                                To being taken

                                                and being taken from

To be an integer

a thorn-snagged

single strand of hair

                       

wavering in the mathematics

                                                of your withdrawal

Take one person from another

                                                then subtract the one remaining

take the person

                        remaining

                                                subtract desert from desert

 Originally published in Volt

Music 5:30                          

Horns open limbs of dusk

Chimed & herbal wind, palo verde wind

March birds catch & thrash

Flick & scratch

                       

Chords of Monday's strobe

            Airplane’s late-shadow, quick-shadow, sun

                                   

Light scales crevice & spine

To know again your hands

Cellular quail peck the concrete slab

            Desert cilia erect in a brief roughness

                                   

Your name

            A thorn in my mouth

Originally published in The Café Review

Slow With Substance

The world was full and still filling.

Desert piled soft.

I imagined loving him. He was otherwise to himself.

He scrolled up and down the glass dunes, breaking the ridges.

He wore green half-sleeves and rolled white pants.

He fell down the wind.

To be as dunes, slow with substance—

How he set himself spinning, one foot on a billion grains of sand.

I wanted to be changed and cured by what I saw—

 Originally published in The Instanbul Literary Review

Reverse of Shadow

Why are we not in the dark     the secret room     learning how to be tender

Music plays whether we dance     or not

Whether a light is on     or off

Do you know when to turn your back on those things you trust

Shade is not meant to hide     but to illuminate the other

                                                                                                               

As soon as we talked about what was not there     the passion of it    arrived

Brave light     reverse of shadow

I cannot say who you are     without saying     who I am

More than anything     let us lower our words

Let us get down on our knees     & not ask

Originally published in Interim

  Bionote

Jami Macarty is a recipient of a 2014 BC Arts Council project assistance for creative writers grant and an Arizona Commission on the Arts poetry fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Canadian and American journals, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Grist, Quiddity, Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Volt,Drunken Boat, The Fiddlehead, and Interrupture. Her first manuscript, You Is to Door, has been a finalist with Persea Books, Kore Press, and Carolina Wren Press. She earned an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University.