Ann Howells

Back to Issue 8

Breath by Breath

Earth exhales and mist rises--
spidery hands etch pines, piers.
Moored boats become palpable
while islanders disappear:
diluted blood, assimilated names.
Chesapeake, you, your tributaries
and islands are perishable
though I wish you were eternal.
I’ve seen seashells atop southwestern mesas.
read of Pangaea, and this island,
my island, haloed by reeds,
seaweed crowning the high tide line,
is neither country nor continent.
Seas nibble it thinner,
its sands travel marauding tides.
The horizon glows gold, peach, rose,
and palest orchid, but even now,
a new hurricane brews in the gulf.

​Moon rise—full & white

Your melted-butter tongue,
my sassafras hands,
their rain-shaped fingers,
perfidious history unwinds.
 
Bug and beetle lyric,
will-ó-wisp flashes
impatience.
 
Gran treads moonlight,
sweeps a long-handled net
among stars. Repeat:
Love is shackles. Shackles.
 
Years effervesce
on the tip of her tongue--
label this lecture #2012.
 
Friday is grocery day--
clanging metal cart, the bagboy
flirting, hot coffee, dry socks,
dinner again at Chik-fil-a.
 
One more blue velvet night,
let the moon scatter
its pieces of silver.

​Cement Truck
          after Tony Hoagland’s “Cement Truck”

I wanted to work that bellowing chain saw
         into my poem
because it is so perfectly compact and lethal
as it shatters and splits its way
         through trunk and limb,
spews sawdust like spittle 

I admire its extended jaw, tiered shark-teeth         
         and toothy gator-mouth,
its sleek grey skin, way it confronts
with throaty growl, way it complains
          of harder heartwood
          in high-pitched whine.

Logically, the poem should include
a steroid-crazed killer
(here I visualize that Texas massacre movie:
          barely pubescent girl in virginal white
          cotton bra and panties,
who lags behind and is, of course,
          slaughtered).

But, the poem skips the miscreant’s role,
focuses on the saw, its business:
          turning trees into firewood,
          sheds into scrap,
          boxes and crates into kindling,
          hardly ever dismembering a teen.
Its acrid stench—a gasoline musk--
          perfumes acres of suburbia.

The poem avoids all humanity,
celebrates, instead, mechanical ferocity,
pauses briefly to marvel
          at mayhem wrought
          before spluttering out of gas.

Ann Howells’s poetry appears in such journals as Borderlands, Concho River Review, Iconoclast, Iodine, Little Patuxent Review, Magma, Spillway, and a variety of anthologies including: Goodbye, Mexico and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas (both Texas Review Press) as well as Pushing the Envelope, Texas Weather Anthology, and Wise-Ass Poetry Anthology (Lamar University Press). She has served on the board of Dallas Poets Community, 501-c-3 non-profit, since 2001, and has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, recently going digital (www.IllyasHoney.com) and taking on a co-editor.

​In 2001, she was named “Distinguished Poet of Dallas.” Her chapbook, Black Crow in Flight, is from Main Street Rag Publishing, 2007. Her first book, Under a Lone Star, is from Village Books Press, 2016. Cowboys & Cadillacs, an anthology of Dallas/Fort Worth poems she edited, will be released in late spring (Dallas Poets Community Press). Ann has been read on NPR, interviewed on Writers Around Annapolis television, and nominated four times for a Pushcart, twice for a Best of the Net.