Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Word Riot, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, Tattoo Highway, and Blue Print Review, among others. He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals including two whippets, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for whippets), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu.

the dung beetle

you won’t find

this in a fortune cookie

 

but the true dung beetle

gives nuptial gifts

 

to his heart throb

and this seems

 

quite appropriate

since love depends

 

on so much shit

you’d think it couldn’t

 

ever happen:

but it does.

 

forms forgotten takes

This morning I recalled too loud and too deep

this time what’s forgotten. How thick on my tongue

 

the words were love said. Pushed back across to me

turned to lost fragrance. The air itself now is suddenly

 

wrong. Bats filling my lungs with their dark wings,

their soundless voices a lava flow. All remembering

 

seared backward: capillaries first, veins, arteries, heart,

and brain twist, blacken, spit into flame. I am learning

 

from here to contain the words for their loss, as some

communion may yet sing me free. I have not remembered

 

the way everything changes, as the cells in our bodies, or

the weather almost daily. As dreams change made entirely

 

of their own vanishing, how the words then outlasted themselves..

January/Garden

Outside through

the kitchen window

 

twigs, limp stalks,

& rain like brimstone,

 

spikes down the garden’s

last rune evidence

 

enough wet wrath

this morning

 

to pit mulch,

black your eyes,

 

bare ground

an insufficient wick.

 

No promise yet

save snow bells,

 

winter jasmine,

lavender heather

 

and the mail’s

early seed catalogs,

 

sirens tossed

on the breakfast table.