Extract(s)

Daniel Singer lives in Colorado where he edits φreHABIT Press and teaches writing and compositional philosophy. His poems and reviews have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Contemporary American Voices, Horse Less Review and Reconfigurations: A Journal of Poetics and Poetry. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Denver and serves on the board of directors at Switchback Books.

Here, The Archeologist Says It Was An Accident

From inside the cabin I can see things never changed

Some of these are incongruous grouse feathers and others are petrified leavings

                              What never changed
                              Things look like this

Some windows have done so
                                     before              which doctors
Some others have bones

So needles                                     sill and flesh button up and I’ll be fine

Some windows do this the same hollow sockets and we haven’t yet

Some others are still full red and fell shade other collections of

The leaving road is never being paved but that’s where the line goes.

II.

Two small boys play at tracking an animal

Wearing the woods close on its back and tight

Leggings of oak ivy and bramble and decorated

With chiggers and lupus cornflower petals and peat

It calls to the hurt bird the rodent and the bird

Of no meaningful wing but how pretty a thing is evolution

Today they trundle and peck at whatever thorax

Whatever bustles six legs or short ventrals

      The nose says I know you I know you whether I am hunger

Whether it is prostomium or beak or black skin shepherding

Air wet fresh scat trod soil into scent wearing body

Close about muscle and bristle and belly and a clean tongue

One boy climbs a tall knotty pine by the fistful remembering

In each direction some landmark they all look the same way

Or the other boy stands at the roots a nervy guard any direction

Could be the way back to the cornfields all but one will go wild