The Guilt of Milkweed

The milkweed stalks finally went to seed for the first time: five pods cluster on various plants, ready to splinter at any given moment. And still the growth continues adding new layers, new inches. I broke one sheathing open, spilling fleece-like fibers and seeds across the gardenscape— a few meandered across the fence, caught on the slant of evening. •

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Received word that Minetta Review accepted “Saint Brendan and the Whale,” one of my more experimental poems. There is a satisfaction knowing my instincts were correct when constructing and reworking the splintered imagery; a mixture of the saint’s reality with the humpback whale’s environment. I look forward seeing it in print—mainly due to the Whitmanesque stanzas draw out beyond the average line length for today’s style of writing. The construction is worth reusing for other projects.

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• he bundled himself inside his guilt nightly, as in a worn quilt
• guilt hides within fractured milkweed seed pods
• the act of conjugating a verb results in the act of guilt
• guilt / silk: connected by odd rhyming
• every cannas is guilty of blooming
• the screen’s cursor hesitates, flickers through its guilt
• a mouse is guilty of its fleas
• guilty poems exist in print, bound to each other
• the right hand is guilty of association with the left hand
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