All Things For A

If you aren’t ravenous
you are naked, disqualified.

If you have no color
hang your head in your roots.

Time to envy remaining
queens in hostile greens
pomegranate reds.

Days stir the air and you wait
for grace to fall
lace your bones.

The trees
pods at their base
weep, as if to say
murderer.

Crumble
occasional feet
rummaging,
a swollen diffuse.

Competition rages
until life is obsolete.

Cataloguing

Wear snake boots, grasp
an illusion
of a bird with an ivory bill-

is extinct says one.

(The diehards don’t listen.)


Another one saw it,
explicated with precision
down to the red swath.


Its cry, the bird
is like a baby, no
is one and its might
will eat out a wall
if need be. Any
way to cut a hole.


“Extinction. It is the death
not merely
of an individual but of all the indiv-
iduals-past, present,
and potential-that make up
a species.
Once gone there is no retrieval.”


One says they are in hiding-all of them,
tips his camouflaged hat
to the swamp.


The groupings are difficult
to discern.
Ones that catch
and stuff,
ones that want
and search.
Ones that read
and write.
Ones near the trees
praying.


Loss is immediate
its effect dispels quickly
considering its original life
time, as if
it, they, never
happened.


I used to write letters
now
stationery seems
obsolete.


Agendas are insipid:
we like the pretty
stuff and if we fly,
or are free to do so,
we envy, need, desire.


It is simple, really.

Jennifer Firestone's teaches poetry at Hunter College in New York City. Her work has recently appeared in So To Speak, Beacon Street Review, South Carolina Review, Phoebe, Feminist Studies, moria, Passages North, Parnassus Literary Journal, The Brownstone Review, Interim, The Cortland Review, The Comstock Review, Free Lunch, Sun Poetic Times, Weber Studies, Borderland, The Cape Rock and Lullwater Review. Her work is forthcoming in yefief, HazMat Review, Karamu, Madison Review, Northeast, Black Spring Review, Lungfull! magazine, US 1 Poets’ Cooperative, Cider Press Review and Diner.

The above poems are from Jennifer Firestone's manuscript Hothouse.

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