The Flower You Put in the Tree’s Pocket is Gone

If every tree is a letter, a forest stuttering over the land. F-f-f 

t-t-t. A velvet lap a cat naps in from afar. A song made up 

of scritch scratch in the wind. I have come with my ax 

to assemble a word. The wind tries to outdo me. Oooooooooo. 

Hsssss.  There is a chair on top of the broken tree. A wilderness 

of branches where I might be king with a beer can crown. My hands 

smell like leaves. Things hidden in the grass and shrubs. Who else 

to place in the seat--no sinewy god all tongue and horns.

Light fans around objects, water makes things shine. Pebbles 

and silt being not quite land. It fools you into wanting.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2014, she received her second Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.