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Three Poems by Peter Spagnuolo
Above: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Cartographer
The monkeys scold that I lost my way, I’ve gone
mad on the march through you, a hand on the whip—
your impenetrable wild I leave undone,
and tame your jungle waste—but wrecked my ship,
so I must spread you open, with no way back.
My rivals tell I’ve grown too old to play
the boy explorer, yet at that perfumed crack
where wells a secret font of youth, I lay
with my discovery, -
“Bird” by Jenna Le
We heard her and came running
We heard her
wings blurred
We heard her fly up the metal chute
only to find herself self-entrapped in our laundry room
self-buried in our linen hoard
her exit route barred
We heard her throat burr
We heard her
wings blurred so we came running
feet bare on the red-carpeted stairs
We heard her so we herded her
We harried her toward an opened window, a soft sunlit square
amid the hard boards
We hurried her and harried her
and herded her toward the open air
our broom-waving horde must have seemed to her a horror
for all that we heralded her liberty
*
Jenna Le authored Six Rivers (NYQ Books,
