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These works have previously appeared in the chapbook, Residual Heat (2014) and on the author's blog, rinsemiddlebliss.com, in 2017. Like Two Dogs Dancing He turns into the comforter of rain, no umbrella or hat, just the quilted sidewalk. The spume from wheels passing through the deep puddle by the stopped storm drain arcs into the wet air like the last blood of his black dog that as a child he once neglected to tie up, hit by the back wheel of a parked Fiat unseen until the car started and its blood waved like a fox tail, like the tail of another dog, a red dog playing with the black dog, wrestling in the rutted red-clay road until the black dog fell exhausted. Airplanes Over the Bog In response to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “The Pear Tree” Bagno. The name means bog. The village may have been a bog before the drainage ditches gridded it into kolkhoz. Crop dusters buzz in the cloudy sky-- always cloudy over Bagno, always muddy at the kolkhoz gate where the people’s tractor shudders diesel smoke through a soot-blacked chimney. Cloudy sky like a black and white newsreel from WWII where an airplane buzzes low, and drops a finned black bomb like a soda fountain cartridge and a child runs with a black mouth open but inaudible over the buzz. The bomb does not hum, does not hiss, does not cry, and I can’t tell in the black and white film if the child’s mouth is full of shadows or blood. In the fields black molehills erupt like impact craters, but we never see the blind excavators alive. My cousin’s model airplane burns fuel oily and metallic, buzzes above us in the cloudy field, flies to the edge of radio range, then out of range down into the calamus, into the cattails, into the wet edge of the black pine forest seeping night, and burrows its lacquered nose in peat.
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