What Rough Beast | 06 17 20 | D. E. Fulford

D. E. Fulford
Three Poems

In the Beginning, I was a Moth

I burned by Appalachian fog-thoughts when it began
here—in the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains

my slight city, new home, boasts year-round sun-filled
aching days of promise, but this March, it was someway

already sighing assent into slate-bloom of gloom
collecting outside the window—like North Carolina

where life began and not to chop the roots of such
Southern upbringing, but years earlier, I set my

defiance on the shelf, placed shiny baubles before
it, forgot it can help stymie my dread bubbling up

after events lose meaning and pour between my
fingers as so much sand, as ocean in a land-locked state

I abandoned myself there stepped into skin of a
woman who never grasped but always held notion

of the thing that
makes me dream
makes me dance

and never arrives.

Silence is Not

it’s electric fizz
it’s seizing neurons’ song
it’s constriction-clasp stifling
it’s dog breath in a room with no windows
it’s walking away from the fight instead of screaming
it’s black noise-torrential cloudburst mountain monsoons
it’s reclamation, the Mother of pause, when the dirt sighs a little

Two Dumb Syllables

It closed our campus.
It gave us two days to amend,
to push face-to-face curriculum
to a rigorously remote system
where students, now Brady Bunch-ed
now boxed versions of former selves—
sans scents/twitches/breath-sounds—
they exist to me amidst deep snippets
of unintentional intimacy: the clothes

heaped, apathetic boyfriends and crinkled
cans from last night while grinning for my
opinion on their rhetorical advocacy projects
and strangling sobs because Dad is leaving Mom
and it is not virus-related—at least, not
that kind—but also Aunt just tested positive

and her five kids are moving in while she
stays bound to future breaths in a sterile bed
but they have to go now, their second job starts
today and they need to find clean pants and
are planning to finish their project when they
get home that night if boyfriend isn’t gaming

or angry because they got home so late and still,

I have no words to tell them anything they need
right now so I acquiesce, say, “Take care,” and

mean it more than two dumb syllables can give.

—Submitted on 06/16/2020

D. E. Fulford‘s work has appeared in Literati Magazine, Dreamers Magazine, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Sunspot Literary Journal, Inklette Magazine, Aurora, and other journals. A doctoral student at the University of New England, she teaches at Colorado State University. Fulford lives in Colorado with her partner Levi and their chocolate Labrador.

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