Fae
Seated on the starry moss beneath the beech tree
she travels like a swallow to far-off continents
and galaxies, back and forth through that invisible
entity we’ve named time.
She may enter the shade domains, rule of ghosts
and cold fires. She may sweep sedge with gauze hands
or scales, feathers, exoskeletons of chitin that litter
and spangle ocean shores.
Surely you can imagine her, under boughs and green
leaves where weeds struggle and roots extend—
cool enclave of wrens and spiders while sun’s heat
disperses beneath branches.
There where her dreams encumber her wandering.
There among mushrooms and might-have-beens.
You cannot see nor can you follow her.
You know she’s there.
The Candy and the Milk
When my children were small
the farm store sold milk
pumpkins peppers blueberries
bushels of tomatoes
warm as July
also an array of jams
candy in low display racks
and cider in cool weather
before the store
closed up for winter.
Even now my grown son says
he recalls the scents.
Fresh melons
and the stone-damp shade
and the candy
and the milk.
Like Me, the Brown Bat
Interior sonar, intuition, scent,
the sound of skin and fur.
Wings with the breeze under them
and the hum of junebugs,
paper moths, the simplest desires:
hunger and thirst, sweet harvest
that the air itself provides,
mosquitoes buoyant. Could be
rain. Could be summer.
Could be a virus in my system
makes me warm and befuddled,
a different kind of suspense
stretched and stuttering
at dusk beneath a mottled moon.
Like you, I circumambulate my life
wandering erratic and a bit blind,
gravity pulling at me as I pull
against it, even when sleeping.
Untitled
in morning sun
ferns shoulder high
crowd jewelweed—
a world with so much green
my eyes ache
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog
