Five Poems by Rustin Larson

 

Fighting the oligarchy one bunny hop at a time. lulu.com

Black Rabbit

 

Eating dandelions

near the swing set

outside the laundromat.

 

He won't run.

I am a box

with a carrot inside.

 

I am a blanket

of strawberry plaid.

I am a picnic

 

near an abandoned

firetruck. He runs now.

He is wild.

 

Lute Broadcast

 

The slow part

makes me think

of a donkey

forced to carry

broken shards

in a burlap sack.

 

Owls

 

We burned twigs

in the park's barbecue.

We roasted hot dogs.

 

It was late September

and night came earlier

than it did in August.

 

We watched the embers glow.

The train from Denver

no longer stopped in our town.

 

We sat in the park

with no train whistles,

but we watched the embers

 

and felt the owls fly

above us.

 

Dreaming on Amtrak

 

The music pursues

toads over rotting logs

and vast forests of mushrooms

 

The train waits there

for seven hours

No one knows why

 

Finally a sailor

gets up from his seat

and tracks down the conductor

 

Something about a bridge

Something about

a missing rail

 

Golden Hour

 

Suddenly it is one o'clock. Where

do we go? The sun follows us everywhere.

What if we could follow the sun?

At 6 pm, late September, it is

the golden hour: everything is

silhouetted in a haze of gold.

What if we could always follow

the sun, the golden hour, and be

bathed in gossamer dream light?

 

Rustin Larson's writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Puerto Del Sol, The Penn Review, North American Review, and Poetry East. His latest collection is Russian Lullaby for Brother Donkey (Alien Buddha Press, 2024).