Earwig Night creature, like the guy in the bar—leather jacket, black pointed boots,sloshed, body slouched againstthe grease-stained wall, but willing,oh my god, to follow me home,too drunk to know what he came forexcept to say, you know you’re meantto love me. When I laughed and locked him out,he sat on the stoop in the rainaway from the streetlight. Leavesfrom the only tree on the streetfound him. I said I’d call the cops,he crawled off covered in leaf litter. Earwigs here hang out under leaf mulchin the dark and rain. They clump togetherwhere the sump pump drains cellar waterinto the daffodil bed. My son dubbed them beer weaselsafter finding one…

Psychopomp Perhaps life was meant to endlike this: fisheyes spiralingacross the caution typeface,the steady burn of diodescatching in stucco nooks,bungalow doors gnawed.The slender digit gnarledsnug on a Glock’s cold, wettongue. Like hollow-pointgold          that flowers carmineout sagittal crests, thefangs bared from jaws of a dog,smoke-hued and rattleboned.The coming spell of comitycindering in your sclera, lungs.Someone collecting the mattercharged on grass & sidewalk,someone emptying your dozing headback into shaky palms of a loved one.Someone to desperately offer warmth,offer your molt understanding:this is not just pattern, this is ageless,it is ritual. Animals extolling earthshine.But there is no moon, no stars,nothing but owl song, the scatterof a possum, the quiet…

Tomato Skins My mother called and said a tiny flapof tomato skin was stuck inside her throatthe way a child who crawled too far might beIrreversibly encased in a mining shaft.Portable generators! All night stand by!I don’t believe she ever again trustedunpeeled tomatoes. A day or two after,she called to tell of watching a butterflytunnel through her garden, and how a jayswooped in and netted its flightin a perishing knot so deft as to yankinvisibility: now that my mother’s dead,and I don’t have to call her once a dayto see if she’s clamped down on somethingunextractable, some taut tarpaulinof indissoluble paradox, I remember how muchshe wanted at the end to…

  To My Neighbor It’s almost Easter herein Elsewhere and the machinesare doing all the work: washing, sweeping,   heating still while I haunt my homeuseless as a second thought.I will never reach the end   of this novel. I will fail to emptythe diaper pail. I will eat lunch standingover the sink and it will taste like   nothing at all. Even the excursionsare broken. The highway turnsand clovers over and under   and over. At the filling stationwhile the car fills itselfI will pass once more   on the opportunity to wipethe beetles from my windshieldin favor of staring south   and if a stranger were to ask…

Beatitudes Blessed are those who take what they can get.Who marry someone who is not the greatestbeauty or athlete that they’ve ever met.Blessed are those who do not have the latesttechnology at command. Who do not speakthree languages. Who cry when something hurts.Blessed are those whose drive to win is weak,stock market failures, poets, introverts.Blessed are those who choose to live alonewith dogs or cats rather than make a speech,who never go exploring on their ownor try for anything beyond their reach.Blessed, who know they’re bound to fail the testand settle down, settling for second best.     Gail White is a contributing editor of Light Poetry Magazine and a…

  The Void Perhaps this shimmer in theemptiness is nothing—it doesn’trealize it holds a shadow. Doesn’t see the leaf-thin lightor the cool, dark tree that bendslike an image on the water’s skin.   Or love the creatures of eye and awewho reach into the sky with silencegleaming at their wrists. Doesn’t notice its own farness wherea star blows wonder open like a flower.     Patricia Nelson is a former environmental attorney who has worked for many years with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is working on a book of poetic monologues by monsters and seers.