by: Dustin Renwick ((Header art by Elena Lunetskaya.))
With a playful gravity that directs our attention to the cosmic and mundane in equal measure, these poems by Dustin Renwick remind us that we live amidst lush and remarkable beauty…
Homemade
avoid the blackberry:
dissected with serifs
’til rhymes run purple
instead choose crimson bubbles
cooked, cooled, jammed, canned,
collided with peanut butter
until tentative tinkling scrapes
of the last glass jar labeled
Red Raspberry
eaten as snow spreads
across the brambles’ thorny knives
allow me to understand Camus
and his invincible summer,
at least in my stomach
INGREDIENTS: sugar, corn syrup, contains less than 2% of the following
by way of divinity & darwinism, ancestral migrations across ancient seas, astronomical
odds of atoms & choices coalesced, not into dinosaur scales, or a dripping disaster (that double-dipped ice cream cone melting into your mostly finished borrowed book), but
you
Payday
the king in a “Song of Sixpence”
vanishes to count coins after dessert
he is most of our friends, who don’t know
how to act when confronted with free time
they, too, abandon pie crumbs on the plate
to pursue more pecuniary projects
we commit the opulent act of a whole
afternoon whiled away in the harbor park
accomplishing, I’d argue, everything — grounded
in the wisdom that the 24 blackbirds always fly away
Dustin Renwick is a triathlete and an avid avoider of coffee. He is a Tupelo Press 30/30 Project alum, and his work has appeared in places such as CutBank, Meat for Tea, and Lines + Stars. His nonfiction book, Beyond the Gray Leaf, is the biography of a forgotten Civil War poet from Illinois.
