The world kept promising corks and vanilla extract
but I need soap because my mouth is a foxhole

which in not unlike seeing the world
and seeing oneself in the world simultaneously

not unlike the hungry man who cursed
may no fruit come from you again

not unlike jersey barriers and pylons
separating an old bridge from the new

not unlike a seemingly arbitrary baby bottle
propped against the base of a streetlight

not unlike the memory of a tree canopy
and the light patterning through to the orange

pine spill floor and patterns the rising dust…
Sturgeon.      Rabbit.          Locust.

***

Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, forthcoming), and the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, forthcoming) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, Western Humanities Review,Witness and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at URI.