Issue 32: Nathaniel Calhoun

     bull runs

a chorus-minded flock rowdy

rolling groundswell breaks

on both sides of beautiful lulls—

water through it all

in irresistible surges.

lightning sears the starscape

but won’t scathe us—

a reassuring echo of close-held

strobe-lit dancing

in the bull runs of youth.

frogs swell after reconsidering. 

their conductor rotates

and everything rotates.

up come bubbles

from a bullfrog boom ruckus.

pocket-nooked crickets persuade

the unsheltered to nestle closer in

while ocean scale movements rip

along the quays.

slender tree frogs stilled

by an eye that wanders over—

when the eye comes back

moments later aren’t there— 

webbed toes retract

beneath lily pads

and goldfish startle.

if again there are bull runs

you’ll see me sweeping

whole armfuls of chips

from the table.

the moon rose seven times tonight

butternut skinned in daylight’s remnant

behind pastured knolls escaping the Pacific

she unwrapped gossamer blankets—

fresh and unsubdued.

vanishing soon after in the recent dark

she gave back the night until her tooth

tore through a gumline of glowtipped totara

filaments silhouetted before her complete

self-blanketing conjured the milky rest

of a cataract lens.

next through banksia and kōwhai  

higher up the hillside, regolith’s throne

goth sauntered through thickening whips

and hedgehog cones, sparse bright-lit

bone canopies.

that trilogy, a precursor to four

cloud-heralded arrivals, new curtains,

new lights for the celebrity backstage

donning whiter gowns, cinching whalebone

between ovations, scrubbed polished

then stripped bare for spotlit encore—

driftwood bright.

each reoccluding enough to wonder if

all would slump below grim folds, drizzling

in the muffled territory of local clouds.

she teased the darkness— 

before raining moonfire down.

wait wait, my wife flourished out of sight:

I’ll do it again but more glamorous— 

her ivory shawl billows back into view.

the first sharing did not fall short but,

let’s indulge in arriving seven times

to the rolling butterwarm blush

of turning points in the sense that

we could be turning around and around

not lost but twirling.

Nathaniel Calhoun works to protect and restore biodiversity around the Amazon basin and in his home country, Aotearoa New Zealand. His poems have featured or will soon feature in Oxford Poetry, New York Quarterly, Lana Turner, Poetry Aotearoa and many others. He is a reader for Only Poems and sometimes tweets @calhounpoems.

Copyright © 2024 by Nathaniel Calhoun, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author