by Cameron Morse
Give thanks green buds
for your hard fuzzy nipples
in the leafless tines of magnolia sapling.
Wobble in the shushings, the sibilants
of November breeze and give
thanks. Among the dogs
at noontime, I would like nothing
better than to close my eyes
in sunlight, feet up on the covered
rim of the new firepit, and let my body
beckon. Let the sunbeaten
side of my head call to the shaded
side, praise and give thanks for its ghost.
I would like to take my cue
from the cockapoo. Roll around in crispy
leaves, walk with my incisive
shadow brother, the lawn a fountainhead of yellow
sleep. Somewhere a rumbling
undergarment, the glitter
of dark trees, and every day another chance
to get it right: salty thumbnail,
cleansing fragrance of leaf
mulch, scraped earth.
Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His second, Father Me Again, is available from Spartan Press and chapbook Coming Home with Cancer is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Press’s Delphi Poetry Series.