Panther Mountain There’s a poem that knows how to carry a namethrough time. It’s full of plants and placeswhose names curve like winding roads. Waltzing nameslike Aviemore and goldenrod. Ancestral magnoliastiffening into star anise and sleeping in rimefor a thousand years. There’s a spot calledPanther Mountain, with fringed polygala,and somewhere, a small town bordered by a darkwood with a hunter’s cabin in a clearing. I’m there,sitting on the porch of the cabin, looking atthe sky of the poem. You’re there too. And all the goodthat you’ve done stretches out across the poem’ssky like clouds made of tiny white letters, like a letterwritten on a napkin at a party that’s cleared…

My Ex-Boyfriend’s Memory is a Broken Mirror I fall off a truck bed every time he dreams of me. I can tell because the bruises look the same-like overgrown plums that stain your hands with psychotherapy ink blotches meant to unveil your daddy issues. My dead father is knocking on the door of this poem now, and he says he’s all better now. I will be too. I interrupt this previously scheduled broadcast for a crying fit without the glory of baptismal tears. The disease of love will wear you shatter-sharp. If a man slaps your mosquito bites so hard it starts a wildfire, for better or worse, he must…

Wild Onion Lose yourself, go blind from ecstasy,forgetting everything, and then perhapsa deeper memory, a deeper recognition will return… —Adam Zagajewski My mother was told she would alwaysretain some bit of peripheral visionbut in the end, she sat in darkness, severedfrom the composed world. If it comes to me,and I can no longer make out the woodcutabove our piano from the piano wood, I hopeI’ll still smell wild onion. The bright sobrietyof the world abandoned—let my imaginationgrow zoetic and wild. A forest filledwith wolves padding trails they knowby smell. Pines adding ring after ring,those belts of bark thickeningaround the hard waists of trees,fresh texture for my outstretched hands.Lose yourself, go…

The Apprentice It isn’t about if,it is about when.When I started, every tradesmanhad a story of neardeath or accidents where fingers felllike leaves to the groundor laid still on the table saw. I learned that the older guyshad the stories readyfor a reason – no more blood on the job, no morenew tales to tell. I was happyto be their apprentice, to see how the work could flowand how right actionscreated right work, right angles came from right plans.Measure twice, cutonce. Dom Bosco, you looked outfor the young, madetheir welfare and success part of your pactwith God, becamea saint. I was green once like allyour charges, the youngapprentices of Turin.…

Fair Lane All our moments are last moments.                          Jens Jensen, landscape architect Many people are trying to find better waysof doing things that should not have to be done at all.                          Henry Ford Gold scum on the pond in the Clara B. Ford Rose Garden.The tin roof of the tea pavilion creaks.Yew hedges train themselves to the limestone wall,and the low-gradient river babbles where those “vagabonds”Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughsand Harvey Firestone rowed and discussed strategiesfor coaxing the proletariat (they wouldn’t have used that term)to…

Guide from Beyond How will I visit you? How about I come to dinner, like we used to do, and drink too much wine. You will spend the day chopping, chopping, chopping, sharpening the knife, curling your knuckles back behind the blade, dicing onions, crying, oils sputtering, picking out stems from cilantro leaves, washing grit from glassware, placing polished silver at each named seat around the table. Here are her linens, you will say, as a puff of steam coughs from my old Rowenta. You will clip fresh marigolds into the chipped vase and not bother to trim the shaggy leaves. As usual, I’m running a little late. It won’t…

Make a Fuss (My Mom Tells Me Again) with lips that thunderafter me      vocal cords that wake the dead in every womanless room where speaking       is like eating dryer sheets she demands of me louderagain but         L  O  U  D  E  R sing againstsilence             let confidence ring: a barbed tongue       chattering       for release I become mouthy                     my wordsshards from a shook-up soda can                    spitting and exploding                  …

My Life as a Starfish An open wound floating on ocean,mangled limbs washed upon rocks. That there could be nearly nothing leftof my body, yet still I would persist. As if survival were a reflex.As if they knew I could not bleed. No blessings. No sympathy. No succor.No synapses. No sutures. No visible scars. And they called me a healer. I did not resume my yoga practice,nor silently meditate on wholeness. I did not subsist solely on quinoaand freshly snipped microgreens. I sank, heartless, deep beneath sandyshorelines, sucked salt straight from the sea.     Elizabeth Rae Bullmer has been writing poetry since the age of seven. Bullmer’s poetry has…

Last night’s storm tore the star-shaped leaves from the maple, and the persimmon tree, already stripped of fruit, was left in a puddle of damp leaves. Sunset speared the bare limbs with shafts of orange light, which were there, then vanished. Beads of water hang from the leaves of the climbing fig, and a chickadee closes its beak over the heavy drops as if they were seeds. It’s mid-October, and the season’s last dahlias are small but ferocious. The nights will soon get even colder. The branches that I pruned from the white camellia weeks ago are in bloom. The withered limbs have somehow pushed out small, urgent blossoms from…

Opening to Your Dark Eye The electricity buzzed out,extinguishing the dinner party;my mother sighed over table elbows,hurried dinners, and napkins tossedaside on plates dribbled with gravy—resuscitating an Emily Post adage:“Etiquette is the science of living.”She died. What did it matter? I divorced embossed stationeryand sold the Steuben candlesticks,each teardrop base entrappingthe shape of a Hershey kiss—like a bell that would never ringin chilly air (glass in its molten stateresembles the final design, a momentfrozen from process, said the maker). The movers shattered my collectionof blue Haviland porcelain,and I caved to dining with the dimmerturned down and thought spelunking,caught in the tale of your eye blindedby the errant swing of a…