2 Poems

by Mark Cunningham

Blue-throated Hummingbird

I go back inside to check the name of the main star in Aquila, though it's February and the constellation isn't visible (Altair). Block, plain-bodied, James Laughlin's poems still thrill me—months will go by, then I'll have to re-read the one about Nabokov and the butterflies, all of _Byways_. When I'm in the bakery to get whole wheat bread, there's no helping it, I have to get three molasses cookies, and they have to be put in a separate sack, because they won't make it home. Now wonder I'm tired: I'll be following one trail, then a couple of joggers will trot by. I hear their weighted rasps; I know what each sounds like panting over or under another body. Then the breathing fades until I don't hear it any more: this is my rest.

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Red Crossbill

Paging through a photo album, I discover the part in my hair belongs to my great-grandfather. I look into the rear view mirror and, instead of the clear stars and half moon, I see the glaring headlights and shiny pavement of a rainy night. I hear an echo in the long distance line. I stop talking, but the voice beneath mine goes on. Even when I’m "alone," when I read the newspaper or stretch, lymph fluid is squeezed through capillary walls, then it either seeps to nodes where it waits to fight whatever else crosses the flesh-line or it filters back into my bloodstream. I am never uninvaded.

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Mark Cunningham has poems in recent or forthcoming issues of Sentence, Practice, and Parcel. Tarpaulin Sky Press will be bringing out a book tentatively titled Body Language, which will be a sort of diptych containing two separate collections, one titled Body (on parts of the body) and one titled Primer (on numbers and letters).