By Rodney Koeneke
The bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed.
Afterlives feel meaningless
but spring will come,
push out the nubs
the kids braid into pallets.
Take up your pallet
from lawns noon’s hardly touched.
The small think gods
just loll on clouds.
Bugs think gods just crush.
Poet Bio
More Poems about Nature
How to Triumph Like a Girl
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest,...
Sestina in Prose
It was like climbing a mountain to those of us who’d climbed one. To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. In other words, we let everybody find her own figure of speech.
Not that it—speech—lay thick on the...
More Poems about Religion
Explorer
I fear dispersal but the resounding really sounds may be full of echo
or echolocation for the next round
Eye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues
body and bow
Fingers spell now all the spaces I open
You now verse...
Dead Men Walking
What did they desire, the dead who had returned?
The sons who had inherited their estates
pretended not to know them. The iron gates
were welded shut, but soon the dead had learned
to hire lawyers practiced in the laws
that bound the afterlife to...