They’re at it again, like every year when August’s heat

crisps the grass and thunderheads swell in a sultry sky,

flinging petals from their boughs like Salome’s veils,

shrugging off bark that slips from their shoulders to

disheveled drifts on the grass and shameless they stand,

pale flesh exposed, beckoning a languid breeze

to come close and wander slowly limb to limb,

and like every year I marvel at their abandon and

voluptuary ways, wishing Mother had taught me

less of birds and bees and more about those trees.

© dana hughes  8.17.16

Molly looks good for a hundred and nineteen, though

her fur has thinned and her pace slowed, and she hasn’t

heard a word I’ve said in years and it seems the twenty-

two hours of sleep she needs and the fretful yelps at my

touch mean she’s slipped into the fog of doghiemers.

This morning when I offered a breakfast of something

she’d never had before, knowing that though she can’t

name the presidents in descending order she does recall

that whatever she ate last won’t be touched again, so I

must invent enticements to continue the grim charade

of eating, a habit she misplaced like a buried bone,

she turned up her nose, as though the mundanity of

chewing, swallowing, and living were just too much, and

I pushed the meat into her mouth like I did with Momma

in her last days when she didn’t know me or why I’d

come to torture her with crackers and cheese and the

nutritious drinks that always made her gag up half of

what went down and all I could do was hope the half

she kept would buy another day and another round of

crackers and cheese and the panic that choked me when

I told her again and again how much I loved her and

lied through my teeth when I said she didn’t have to

stay if it was time for her to go because I would never

not need her though every time she asked my name a

piece of me crumbled. It’s hard to explain to a deaf

dog that it’s not for her sake that I want her to eat

but for mine.

©Dana Hughes 2.26.16

It was my decision they said when

they came with wringing hands

and word of yet unspoken

but newly broken vows

sundered by a shadow

planting seed in the soil

where mine should be,

but they hoped I’d understand.

Of course of course I said

and why not take to wife

the one who had not shied

from the advance of another?

No angel came to prick my heart

and prod my thoughts or

unfold the vaunted plan.

It was my decision to keep her

alive so that after she was his

she would be mine.

© Dana Hughes 2.13.16

Stepping out of the tub

in the only bathroom in the house

of my lover of thirty years ago

on my first visit to his home

to meet the wife and kids

although he has been a fixture

all these years in the home

in my dreams;

reaching for a towel and wondering

if anyone could hear

the jackhammer of my heart

or if the wattage of my gaze

hurt their eyes as we smiled

over a perfect pot roast at dinner,

cooing and clucking at our past

like a puppy under the table,

careful not to slip it any scraps

lest it sit up boldly and beg;

finding not the sturdy terry-cloth

that was there when i came in,

but the blue leg of his pajamas

dangling by the waist string

over the hook

on the back of the door.

“We’ve changed,”

i whispered to the worn soft cotton,

gathered in both hands

and pressed against my face,

“back then we never wore pajamas.”

© dana hughes 1.13.16

The packet of beans said

“sow after average last frost”

which implies that an April

freeze is nothing to fret about

since the average frost ended

as March began, so into the

bed they went, snugged in

the soft thawed soil.

One day shy of ten, the fleshy

cotyledons shouldered the dirt

aside , revealing tips of first

leaves tasting the air like the

tongues of snakes, only green.

Also stirred were the beds of

slugs whose slick spawn found

the sprouts within easy reach,

and one day shy of twelve

the garden was gone.

The packet of beans warns of

the cold yet says naught of the

peril of growing nor of the ache

of promise devoured when nothing

remains but the beckoning soil,

soft and willing and warm.

© dana hughes 7.7.15

1

The Jasmine unfurls

like the fevered dervish whose

dizzy dance is prayer.

2

I’d like to think these

south-bound parts portend a day

of righteous molting.

3

They wouldn’t stay shut,

after she passed on, so I

closed her eyes again.

1

Backlit finch in flight

reveals the structure of wings

I so wish to have.

2

Mrs. Bluebird sits

away from the nest singing

her babies to flight.

3

In a Dixie cup

by the sink a single seed

opens, roots and grows.

4

Honeybees hover

above the lavender blooms

tasting the scent first.

1

bare nests in gray trees
hold fuzz from chicks pipped feathered
grown flown going gone.

2

robins run amid
bright blades of green drumming worms
to surface for lunch.

3

the eruption of
blooms on the cherry tree sing
of promise renewed.

4

proud labradoodle
with soft mouth carries tree limb
home for inspection.

© Dana Hughes 3.23.15

As it turned out,

the old man walking at a tilt

along the road, with shoulders

hunched high, bare bald head

thrust low between, and knobbed

fingers twined for balance behind

as if he might blow over in a heap

if he stood straight, though there

was no wind to bend him, despite

the sound of leafless limbs in near

trees clacking as they scraped a

bruise upon the patch of sky above,

was a buzzard,

after all, advancing toward the city

that would neither shelter like chicks

beneath a mother’s wings, nor exhale

the breath sucked in when, untied,

the borrowed colt of a donkey

began to bray.

© dana hughes 3.13.15

In the middle of the night while not sleeping, I heard it

snagging on the floorboards as it crept to my bed,

slinking on gold toes until, with the sound of fine unraveling,

it leapt up and landed in a black tangle on my breast

where it settled its foul haunches and sat leering in the dark,

exhaling the sour pickle smell of it’s fetid, fungal breath.

The Sockubus had come!

Bringer of nightmares of unmatched pairs of casual and dress

eternally inverted, mud-caked, sweat-stiff and grass-stained;

of shoe-chewed heals and unknit holes where toes should be;

of elastic snares and nylon pills and sliding shapeless cuffs,

and the telltale bulge of the renegade hidden inside a pajama leg.

He mocked me with bawdy visions of mateless socks reproducing

with sybaritic abandon, wantonly flinging themselves limp and

spent into the lint and cat hair repository beneath the bed.

“Lord save me!” I gasped, crushed by the weight of loose threads.

“Fool!” the dark thing spat, cackling like the hellish rip of static cling,

“What help do you expect of a God who wore sandals?”

© Dana Hughes 1.16.15