Thursday 5 February 2015

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.

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