farm

Childlike,

with brambles growing loud,

I stop to pick wildflowers as if

again my sandals  grew green

with sour-grass

convolvulus danger undulating;

the bees too warm, growing tired.

When Sexton compared cut butter

to giants teeth, it was the first I knew,

since Sinbad, that giants were real.

In a cart with a shallow box body,

two wheels

and shafts for pushing it.

Grandma kept her butter whipped

in a dish, hand made, like a pile

of goat s**t; churned but easy/

what silica get's drunk on limestone

and crushing applause anyway?

What cow feels the sharp, stinging pain

of childbirth, whose pervading smell,

so powerful, it leads mama

to lick the placenta to powder?

However tenderly God nests.

Farm and fawn, no-doubt,

becomes the wind.

Reviews

[writing mojo]

minimalist a projective dark which through the contrary of senses can be a child for the first time with his hand in the fire.. Thou to some this is just learning through an experience with scars, it's still the pretty lights on the fourth of July that make us wait in traffic for hours, that makes us curse in traffic and smell of high heaven with pictographs of summer in mind, to osculate the difference between nuclear war or the big bangs against the rear view and where to vacation from life...excellent piece

[h d e rushin]

I was trying so hard to sound like you here Josh.. That's right, I do cheat this creative process.
dana

[Frank]

Brilliant, but I wish I could understand every line as you meant it when you penned it with your golf ball type writer or your keyboard and then I don't want it explained I want to roll in it and soak up the letters and make them into chocolate waffles. I don't want to push things down your throat but I would like to enter your mind by an open door.

Oooh, steady on, I think I got carried away then.

p.s. I almost made a mistake then, I left out 'mind'. Funny how one word changes everything.

[Ken Simm.]

The overwhelming feeling I get from this memoir is power. In that it is an extremly powerful piece. In its evocations; in its empathy; in its languid memories. The nostalgia is a vehicle for this art to flow. The artists voice born out of these experiences. I must mention the fact that you have the power born of a different kind of experience to break out of the soft and rosy into the hard but nontheless beautiful.

[Ed Hart]

you are truly a force of nature, and sing truth like johnny appleseed spread his

[W.k.kortas]

To piggy back on what jacob has said...the Sexton reference is a telling one, a somewhat playful image from a decidedly less-than-playful piece. What is striking about this poem is the deft intermingling of the occasional playful image ("what silica's get drunk on limestone", the idea of churning goat s**t) with the very elemental stuff of life that those who are generations or degrees of lifestyle removed from the farm tend not to be privy to. This is virtuoso stuff.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i am still digesting this one...not the goat s**t though...:)))
but i love the idea of learning about giants existing through Sexton...