Tyler Dunston

Mare Frigoris

Originally published in Sheila-Na-Gig

 

Some mornings I shovel snow

and watch the pigeons vault

from the churchtowers

 

bewildered by their power

flimsy wings rising

and falling against the gray

 

the window shutters blink

in amazement at the sudden taking off

of so many birds

 

scraping against a plane of snow-

marked sky as they angle

toward my garbage bin

 

they land among the sleet and gravel

and tear at the wet bread rolls

angels from a Hadean earth

 

hatchlings of a moon so close

their pneumatic bones would glow

like x-rays in its light

 

8 lines in the Grace Church garden

Originally published in Nimrod International

 

How’d the rubble get there

fragments of stone, grotesque, and edifice

crumpled in the corner like laundry

the grass around it greener than anywhere else

in the courtyard where someone is deciding

whether to stay in the sunlight a little

while longer or to go and a pigeon is flying

from a rain-black magnolia to the rectory

Tyler Dunston is a poet, painter, and PhD student at the University of Michigan studying literature. He holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University and his poems have appeared in Red Wheelbarrow, Nimrod International, The Mountain Troubadour, and elsewhere.