by Brett Rutherford
I would most likely be among
the angels who rebelled.
While others were hurled
from the cliff-edge of Paradise,
I, sick of the place,
would leap willingly.
Nine days we'd fall.
Then, from my own
individual Hell,
I’d plague the Devil.
by Brett Rutherford
I neither hip nor hop,
I neither tik nor tok.
My hand has never turned the key
to make an auto start.
The things I wish had never been
make quite a list, you see:
the gas-bomb car foremost of all,
the things I call inedible —
okra and cottage cheese,
mushroom and avocados.
Strip malls and six-lane
highways make me yearn
for a sudden apocalypse.
Ears covered, I uninvent
the electric guitar
(there, I have said it!)
Each day fresh horrors
present themselves,
some incomprehensible.
Vape stores one side of me,
tattoo parlors the other,
a shop-sign offering
to thread my eyebrows,
or make my visage
botox paralytic.
Born in another
century, I have no clue.
I still have no idea
what a Kardashian is.
by Brett Rutherford
The white moth, solitary, the meadow’s
lyric poet, has neither master nor peer.
His wingbeats define, defend domains
as the quest for the lover, invisible,
a smidgin of a thing dun-brown,
expectantly athwart a trembling branch,
the thought of whose existence sustains him.
His quest will be epic in advance of the frost.
Together they might meet tragically
if at all: Romeo, too late, at Juliet’s grave,
or Isolde, too late, expiring upon
his grounded, dead, pale pinions.
On every lawn I pass, on each
well-tended patch of native plants,
even the most denuded place presents
its single, white, solitary moth.
For the first time ever, one lands
upon my open palm, lingers
just long enough to hail me:
Brother!
