Karen Craigo

In the Notebook by My Bed

 

I find notes to myself

from my midnight self,

whose penmanship

lacks. I like that lady,

her stridency—determined

not to lose a scrap, she drops

the sleeping ego a note

concerning a mug, worked

in lonely earth and chosen

from a pile of mugs, each

looking much the same. She

underlines, exclaims—This

you need to hear, she signals

with a slash of descenders,

too rushed to cross her Ts.

Sometimes, the pure language

of the mind is untranslatable,

but I hear how she’s burning

to reach me—she is holding out

a vessel, we chose it for

some reason, and now each

of us questions what makes

the other so desperate

to break through.

* * *

Clair de Lune

 

There’s this boy,

in love with the moon.

He spots it slivered

in the daylit sky,

and I’ve heard him sing

through the glass,

some lunar language

I forget, and I’ve spied

him under it, placid,

smooth-lidded, basking

in the white. Just

yesterday he broke a nail,

cradled it in his palm,

said Mom, look—

a hand-moon.

* * *

Gathering Eggs

 

I open a door, no bigger

than this notebook, and out

they rush, in a panic for dirt.

 

I’m here for their eggs,

something they give up easily,

and I get it, some months

entire paychecks collected

by snake-fingered hands.

 

There is the matter of food

and water, then I scan the pen

for the sly fuck-you of yard-eggs.

 

I wonder if they saw

the meteor last night, fast-

skidding like a stepped-on yolk,

but these are early birds, bent

on the business of scratch.

 

In their boxes I measure

the heat of their orbs,

but one girl waits me out—

quiet-sings her egg song,

eyes me as I back away.

* * *

Karen Craigo's first full-length poetry collection, No More Milk, is forthcoming this summer from Sundress Publications. She teaches writing in Springfield, Missouri, and she writes daily about poetry and creativity in the blog Better View of the Moon.