Best if purchased by 5/17/last semester

My poetry is like a loaf of Wonder bread. If you don't keep it in the refrigerator, it will get stale and grow mold within a few days.
These are some gems from the deep freeze that I came across from my poetry class last semester and that my professor liked. I was forced to write stuff, and this is what I came up with. Since any piece of writing doesn't truely exist as art until it has an audience, I thought I'd post them. (The other four poems I had to write were dried into croutons for the birds long ago.)

Spring

The dogs are prepared for spring,
sheared like sheep in the
early Saturday sun. Blue postures on the porch
as the horse clippers lay tracks on his back,
and fur falls to the concrete collecting in a
loose merle fluff at his feet, or flies into the trees,
soon to become cribs for bald,
blind birds.

Cobber, the other, is dreaming under the car
and the machine’s buzz. His legs pump horizontally, taking
him nowhere. His lids beat as if he were seizing,
and I see the backs of his eyes – mucid, milky bulbs,
showing him nothing. Blue yelps and wakes his litter-mate.
A skin tab on his stomach got caught in the blade sending two crimson missiles
from his tuck, that spread into roses
upon impact. I put one finger on the wound. Cobber
tries to sleep. Blue’s blood coagulates. The sun warms
and melts snow.

I woke to silence on Thursday morning.
No cockatiel squawks or cat-calls from the cage in the foyer. I found
Mr. Yellow far from his perch, half-paralyzed, resting on the bedding.
With his beak and left foot, he drug his right side,
rung by rung, to the top of the cage, carrying his distress
like Quasimodo and the tower, trying to convince me
he was okay. Cancer. An olive-sized tumor on the x-ray.
“Probably on the testicle,” said Dr. Dan,
“It pressed on the nerve and paralyzed his right side.
Poor little guy.” A tumor as big as my thumb
in a bird as big as my hand. If we had caught
it earlier, even as recently as September, we could have helped. But birds
don’t show illness. In the wild, at the first sign of injury,
the bird will be killed. I whistled with Mr. Yellow the day before
we gassed him, blissfully unaware.


moon glow

she gives us light
rippled blue on lake waves
bright white on winter’s sheets
creamy through our window pane
showing you the way - your calloused hands
that fumble in her absence - not at all
during the day
rough on pink skin
i don’t want the light on
i want to show you with my
moon glow


-Thank you and good night.