TRAVEL NOTES

The boat was too small.
Children made weak, muffled noises.
Hush, they’d been told. Not a sound.
The birds released menacing cries.
Their feathers were like rust.
The boat rose and fell with the bruised swells
as water sluiced over the sides.
The curdled sky wobbled. Rain
was imminent.
Everyone was hungry. Everyone
pulled their arms and legs tight against
themselves, feeble cocoons.
No land was in sight. The rock-strewn coast
behind them, the gray unknown ahead.
It was impossible to sleep except
the babies slept, thanks be to god.
Luck was in the boat or not in the boat.
The sea was a large, greedy mouth.
Perhaps there would be a miracle.
Soft prayers mingled with the stink of fear.
Muscles twitched and ached.
Hours or days, no one knew.

MINUS HOURS

By the river, as if fish
sheltered under trees for solace,
                         returning to brash water as needed,
                         eyes blinking, silt settling.

What do you call the brunt of morning?
Chatter of rough wings,
                         the early risers, harping
                         on light, cheerful and pink.

There could be no other wind. The frogs
collect in serenade, plus cicadas.
                         Emptiness fills with trills and chirps,
                         quavering shadows.

At the riverbank, contemplation
in various greens – mossy, dank,
                         as a full day finishes,
                         the cottonwoods nodding.

PREDATORS

I walk down to the pond to find
a memorial to the heron babies ravaged
by eagles. They tried to be good parents
says the hand-scrawled note attached to a spray
of gaudy artificial flowers.

Last week, after a fuss and rustling, a cat shot from
the tall grass in the backyard, a rabbit in its mouth.
Today, a rabbit pops out of the bushes, pays me
no mind. Neighbors report a fox, a weasel, a deer,
and plenty of coyotes.

Bring out your dead, they used to cry during the Black Plague,
piling them on wagons like firewood.
The coyote eats the cat who eats the rat.
The virus needs no wings.

Mercedes Lawry is the author of Small Measures, which won the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press, and three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, which was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Mercedes’s work has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize and her fiction was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.