Joshua Poteat Poems

Must it be this way, the air no longer wet, seamless,
no longer ours, becoming the cicada's path
from night-blooming cereus to creosote,
...

On the side of a desert road
a headless dove,
its body a basket of ants,
...

Then the rain came,
full of a sadness I've never seen before,
through the cottonwoods
...

I have seen the morning spread over the fields
and I have walked on, trying to forget
how it seemed as if daybreak was founded
...

I'm looking for a story that will light
my way out, a star in the sycamore's grass,
taken from night and nothing and limbs cut
...

North up 24th Street a fire truck laments
past my porch to the projects where someone
is rising through the living body of Sunday afternoon
...

I apologize on behalf of the dead.
They do not mean to hurt us.
They show us a way to be in the world,
...

In an autumn fog, it is easy to mistake a falling leaf for a sparrow,
the simple brown of their backs: hollow-boned meadow.
A pale branch of seed in its beak, a string of feed corn.
...