In black and white you sang a dream

of bluebirds and rainbow that shaped

me like a bonsai pine leaning hard

into a still wind. That was me at your

side on the long road back to the home

you thought better of leaving once you’d

gone, and I more than any other coveted

the sequined power of those ruby shoes

to dance me down a road of my own,

out and away. I believed it all, even your

remorse, which left me unshod and shaking,

whirling like a twister in my own backyard.

Your dream wasn’t mine after all

and those shoes were wasted on you.

©Dana Hughes 10.28.19

#2’s poised above the page

teacher intoning instructions

for the first test taken in a long line

of tests on which the future hangs;

fill in the bubble leave no stray marks,

as if those dark circles aren’t all strays

filled as they’ll be with assumptions,

the eenie meenie miney mos of our

thinking given that we’re children

when first asked to prove what

we know.

This Fill in the Blank is essential to

identity for this is how we learn same

and other, naming what goes in that

space, molding thought like lumps of

Play-Doh into forms we claim are

recognizable, yet even Moses needed

more information to fill in the blank when

the bush burned and a voice said go.

It wasn’t the message that stilled

him where he stood but the blank he

couldn’t fill. Give me a name, a trait,

an address, he said, but the voice replied

it doesn’t really matter as there’s only me

so tell them it was I who sent you, an answer

that didn’t fit the question just like the one he

got when asking for a face-to-face and the

voice said seeing me will kill you, implying

that blank cannot be filled with what we know

since all we know is through being us and

the one who spoke is everything we’re not.

Evenso we pencil in the answers and

deem them correct despite the lack

of proof and grade our fellows in red

when their response does not match

ours and the unanswerable mutters,

stray marks stray marks.

©Dana Hughes 9.15.17

Dark eye of brown hawk on light pole glints

as sun climbs over prairie dog town,

all hummock and shadow,

where lone dogs surface

like pop-tarts.

Hunger takes wing.

©Dana Hughes 9.18.19

The storm came on sudden as a seizure

flaying the tender skin of spring with hail

the size of peach pits so by morning

the blush of green lay in sodden drifts

spackled with mud, as did two brown

sparrow chicks, pushed from the nest

as they fledged when the second hatch

was laid and homeless they pled for

shelter until pelted into silence,

well outside their Father’s care.

© Dana Hughes 6.22.19

The old man looking down from a high window

on the memory care floor at children he’d forgot

were his, despite prompts that stirred the soup

of thought though nothing like a name or face

broke the surface before they said, as always,

“we’ll see you next week,” and yet the way the

son’s hands sank into pockets to fish for car keys

toggled a wire like the switch on a Lionel 00 train,

and he strained to find a latch where no latch

would be shouting, “GEORGE!  GEORGE!”

at the departing man below whose name

had always been Michael.

©Dana Hughes 6.19.19

In the middle of the lake where the geese gathered,

a lone gander rode the eddies in silence,

head tucked to wing in the sleep of no waking,

great black feet straight and still, reedy calls

of his mate unheard as she paced the snowy shore

knowing but unwilling to join the skein who made

their peace and paddled in widening arcs away

while the sun slipped it’s perch and sank, as at last did he.

© Dana Hughes 4.4.19

The weeping cherry is a sparrow tree

bristled with birds and other small things

that shelter within the unkempt tangle

of the crown, spilling in knots like Medusa’s

locks would if she slept poorly and couldn’t

get a brush through the nest of snakes that

bare their teeth as I do with you when

you’re too long gone and this refuge recoils,

licking empty air with a thousand tongues.

Look away quick. Stone comes to those

who stare at the writhing that warns

without hissing. This one sings.

©Dana Hughes 1.14.19

Like a pendulum I have coursed

from here all the way to there

and then reversed and come back

to this very spot worn like the ground

beneath a swing where small feet have

scuffed the grass clean away before

lifting skyward in an arc that simulates

the ecstasy of Icarus just before the wax

warmed and gave him over to Gravity

just as I was in the instant after letting

go in an exchange between up

and down that I swear sounded like

a voice saying NOW, when flying

became falling and the ground

rose up, indignant at my temerity.

Yet as before when breath returns,

I’ll be up and at it once more.

©Dana Hughes 12.31.18

It was close to the end when Daddy said

get her out of here, though he’d insisted

he could manage her care, which he thought

meant fixing a plate of runny-side-up eggs and

limp bacon every day (neither of which did she

ever eat because in her mind, when it was still

a mind, that shit was never what she would call

food), and settling her onto the couch with a blanket

and a cup of coffee so he could watch TV and she

could need nothing until dinner. So he was undone

when she never again made it to the bathroom in time

and the sheets were always in the wash, and when

the combative days came on like a thunderstorm out

of her clear blue eyes so she screamed when he woke

her and called him every god damn name but the one

his mother gave him, flailed as he dressed her and sent

the hated eggs sailing in an arc that mimicked her

decline, he threw in the towels: bath, dish and paper,

and confessed she was more than he could handle.

We came with assurance that the move would be swift

and she would be happy which was code for “someone

who knows what the hell they’re doing will change her

diapers and feed her and treat her like the baby she has

become instead of the surly wife you think does what

she does to spite you.” We packed a bag and bathed

her and when she handed me her teeth I understood

Daddy in a way I didn’t want, then scrubbed with

janitorial fury anyway and tucked them in fast to

cover the naked gums she had never allowed her

children to see. As we drove to the place where

she died six weeks on, she kept asking, over

and over and over again, “Do I know you?”

©Dana Hughes 8.25.18

The potter at the next wheel turned a ten-pound lump

of black clay into a bowl of perfect grace rising from

the base in an arc like opening wings, while the clay

I worked refused to behave, wobbled drunkenly and

did not mince words in letting me know that whatever

I thought I was making would shortly be lump again

as the whole spitting affair collapsed, a squelching

glob to be scraped away, wadded up and not thrown

away but set aside for an hour or two to stiffen up

for another go at becoming something other than dirt.

Clay has its own mind, and persuading it to assume

any shape takes practice, practice, practice, with nothing

but failure assured until a truce is struck; potter and clay

having their say and yielding, one to the other, in an act

of co-creation. The Genesis stories only hint at how this

was done, omitting the part about first, second and third

attempts at making a human by a deity who hadn’t done

this before, as well as the moment of divine glee when

Adam was finally pulled from the mud, followed by the

less joyous moment when the man of earth grabbed God’s

nose and gave it a painful tweak.  It wasn’t biting an apple

that stirred up all the trouble, but the raspberries Adam

blew on that day he was formed, sparking the wrestling

which will continue as long as the wheel turns.

©Dana Hughes 7.20.18