Caroline Misner Poems

She must have had great patience
to preside over me for so long;
she watched the sunset and never questioned it,
she just lay there with that ironic smile
...

Bronze florescence buzzes and winces;
above me masked faces hover,
voices beat
the stale old tattoo:
...

A terrible convulsion, then
my vision is complete:
boneless as a shark,
all flex and gristle,
...

When the moonlight fractures the patterned frost,
in fragments chiseled into the glass,
shattering and refracting its battery
of light, in silent solace through my window,
...

The round notes eat these humble associations,
their clangor rising in off-key mist
like the voices of tired old women in hats
of straw, improbable in their perfection.
...

Rust has burrowed black holes
through its porcelain skin;
bullets have punctured the tin, a firing squad
having battered it out of shape;
...

A milk bottle film coats the sky,
the humpbacked hills bristle evergreen,
tricorns white as arctic snow unfurl
their brazen petticoats, stiff and starched.
...

My sister was named Orleans
After the town where she was born,
Dear Orleans, my best friend,
A little girl with hazel eyes,
...

A brief life,
but benevolent,
killed between my
palms, felled like
...

We watch for them each year
when the ferns grow green and thick
and their bristled leaves release
their beards to full furl.
...