Flying Island

O, Susanna Twelve and my breasts           begin their slow swell, moon-bright in the seventh month of my slumber. This strange sheen, as within the begonia’s waxy              heart, my neck a spreading alpenglow            when, in front of the boy from Glasgow County, Norah Clond snaps my training bra. Small discs of turquoise hang        from my ears like fingerprints, the shape pressed into my chest like Ms. Smoots taught us to find lumps    grain-thick in the paddy of some temerarious fright, that dim    scepter, womanhood . Mornings she brushes the tops                of strawberry plants with her palms to find the dark pebbles of fruit. After P.E.    girls fold their bodies as a mantis       its pious limbs              into clothes that exhale what perfume         our mothers allow.     And O for shame the day she finds them, unmistakable knots, gristle, seedlings in her left breast. Mother        cannot take me; Father runs the truck

                                                              After the Fire Before the fire next door at Rara Avis Apartments on 417 S. Fess, the dumpster had over- flowed richly, a stinky marketplace, inviting tenants to fling overstuffed black trash bags from the windows above. The American flag serving as a shade at a glowing window bothered me some, but it became all right after the fire—flames that ravaged the second-floor corner apartments, facing away from the dumpster—blackened into eye-sockets in the skull of the building. Today, the Rara Avis dumpster has been normalized by bona fide trash: - flattened-out, stained, frozen food cartons - storm-broken tree branches - yawning styrofoam clamshell carry-out food boxes - soggy cylindrical toilet paper cores - battered, dented, venetian window blinds - plastic buckets of scum-saturated sponges   and half-used Clorox cleaner bottles scavengers di scouraged like overfe

Amid the Plough, Orion, Cassiopeia Sometimes we assume the stars have all the horses: plowers of want, whinniers of need. Eye-graze those silver orbs miniaturized by distance, dazzling light across the cosmos. How improbably shaped constellations are with their fiery suns, backward- revolving moons, pastures of possibility. In the Gaia wind, prance awhile, weave your spiral hair over your cave ancestors, pretend that they--Denisovans, Neanderthals-- now scattered bone relics and mud DNA, will remember, be remembered. Doris Lynch has recent work in Frogpond , Modern Haiku , Tipton Poetry Journal , and in the anthology Cowboys & Cocktails: Poetry from the True Grit Saloon.   The Indiana Arts Commission awarded her three individual artist's grants, and she has worked as a librarian and an Ivy-Tech creative writing instructor.