Hunters & Collectors
A kind of funeral at the science center.
I press a button, & it comes alive;
the recessed fixtures flicker in the ceiling.
Up close, an ax-cut cypress,
a fake trunk. Swamp light soughs shadows,
crepuscular light. Cricket sounds from hidden
speakers stridulate, a brown pointillist
rustle through bendable trees.
Spiderweb, butterfly, bee.
Autumnal redolence wafts along the floor.
That smell. I’m transported to the creek
where I played as a kid.
On the bank, veiled
with gnats, I fashioned
a fort of collapsing sticks,
hid my treasures under pine straw:
translucent beetle husks,
white-green lichen lace,
& pink quartz.
Precious gems caked with orange clay.
Back here at this museum, I follow a white
cottontail as it disappears
into a culvert.
Rotting leaves & larvae
squiggle & twirl question marks in a resined pond.
Two foxes have eaten the rabbit’s
mate, strewn its fur
across the diorama.
A cemetery in the woods.
A second rabbit escapes into a copse
as the painted nightscape blinks beyond.
Those foxes. They lounge
like royalty. The female rests
her paw
on her prey’s remains
as if patting it to sleep. Her amber eyes
all taxidermy shine
& weary frankness.
A child crosses the gallery, drawn
to the drama. The girl’s wet nose pokes
at the glass. What are the foxes doing? she asks.
Her mother checks her watch.
The father taps
his daughter’s shoulder. They killed it. For food.
The kid’s mouth opens, closes,
her soft baby teeth pointed.
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Leaves Aim toward Thunder
Spring dithers, spurns its season, refuses
to muscle in. Suicides. The wrens abandon
three eggs on the stoop. Along the overgrown
path, a wondergarden sings with feeling, terrapins
sunbathe. Over there, red fern sprouts shoot first,
ask questions laterm and a scissor-tailed flycatcher
dives for a katydid. Those pines worry every minute
about this wind. In the warm kitchen, my fruit’s
over-ripe, but I bite into the pear anyway, ponder
how your heart never conformed, how you never
noticed leaves aim toward thunder. A storm bangs
open. It racks the yard; the lilac molts pink petal
confetti as the parade of wet vehicles file past
on the road, faces of passengers dull as worn-out coins.
You’re merely an idea now, swaddled in white.
A brittle husk of memory. All the paintings disappear;
the water dries up for stars so bright they bleed.
I know lightning’s unstable, but I’ll call it what I will.
A charge of static, a frayed thread that stitches the air
and ground together—whatever that was between us,
a force with no name, a language we couldn’t speak,
words not written. No words can capture that teeming,
fraught menace. Our words waited for invention that never
came.
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Spooky Little Things
The day up & closes. A spiny
orb-weaver rappels the wall—
that spider from who-knows-where
mends gapes in her web,
tethers doomed
moths to lunch through
the night’s sad hours, patient,
determined, pricking at strands
until her dawn retreat.
I’m not territorial like that.
No, I travel old corpse lanes,
sloped & tattered roads.
Where? Who knows? Who cares.
My headlights capture wraiths
at 3 AM. Cold spots. Shines.
Shucks are unwanted
travelers, phantoms who
wait to pass over, their faces
like ripped flags. I aim away
& my antenna catch faint
signals from far-flung places,
the crackles of DJs,
whose whispers stitch
somewhere towns
& highway nights
together. There, some
gods see stars.
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Things I Never Said
Antiscian: noun—a person whose shadow at noon is cast in a direction contrary to that of an inhabitant of the other side of the equator living upon the same meridian
I need the sound of your name, the rhythm
of your vowels. I listen
for inhalations, for your antiscian
breath. I’m trying to remember
what it’s like to speak with someone,
but I can’t feel my tongue.
Even if I could, what would happen?
We exist in different hemispheres.
I’d write you letters, but I’d have to wait
for them to arrive across an equator.
Noon wakefulness. How dark’s your sun?
Your murmurs don’t reach me.
But I could dig to China, and I wouldn’t
plow through your latitudes.
Below my window, figs in the over-full tree catch
the gift of mid-day light. A single sparrow
calls alarm. I pivot away, peel an orange—tough skin
tugged reveals so much juice inside.
I need this body.
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Cate McGowan, a fiction writer, essayist, poet, and visual artist, is the author of two books—a novel, These Lowly Objects, and a short story collection, True Places Never Are, which won the Moon City Press Fiction Award. McGowan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Norton’s anthology, Flash Fiction International. She serves as an associate poetry editor for jmww and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. Find out more about Cate at https://catemcgowan.com.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 