Two Poems

Flowers On Edge

It was our age finally starting to show.
The airplanes overhead
filled with firecrackers and bone china
with delicately shaken inscriptions
about the reasons for our love. It was
then the satellites
knew our names. We told them in secret
on the public balcony. The astronauts stirred
the O2 tanks and what we knew
came next was a great tension in knowing
what came next. This was the final proof
against the feathering of the night.
Hard winds against the land-
locked harbor. Decisions in the sand as the water
circled in the glass that thought to open your hand
like a balloon. It took a little death to take up anything
in the world. People somewhere
drinking wine coolers, still. What didn’t move
moved into a fog land, stood in a city while meteoric
signatures exploded over Russia’s face.
We held on to each other in the sound but only
in the sound, knowing well the clamor
was possible uncertainty or welcome.

​

​Sequester​

I flounce the day moving / china
cabinets from the past / to the future
this money / ringing in my hand
can’t explain what / exactly a flounce brings to
the work week / just as impossible my vision
in the momentary landscape / of glass and wood
definitions only move me / into the fog land
I’m just like / full of gas
somebody says their echo / radioing
clear in the pressed / maple field
in midst this sound / sea
clear that the immediate is / dangerously
near I / remove my space gloves just
wrong time / the cold opposite of wolves
arriving for rabbit I breeze / into a resurrection
the hiding away / nebulae of skin
the falling apart action / to stretch over-wide
prepare for the hard end / of nothing

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Mike Krutel is from Akron, Ohio, where he is a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review and a co-curator of The Big Big Mess Reading Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in NOÖ, iO, Jellyfish, Big Lucks, The Bakery, and Forklift, OH.