BROTHER CABIN
[October]
this silence
exposes too much
Black Form; I’m in bed
haunted by the lake
the moss, the alps, almost
melting into the solitude
I’d kiss them all
but my body is not so easy
to stay in
°°°
the cabin will not
permit my brother
to go limp, so I
sit alone in the orchard
where a stillness can run
deep through
my veins
°°°
I write starved, wild
with lightness, stalking
through these trees
where my brother slipped
into the glowworms
and horses on the other side
of the lake
_____________________________________________
BROTHER CABIN
[December]
I cook, red embers
glimmering and my hips
very beautiful; in this small
orchard, I could eat
twenty solitudes
*
noisy with
34 years of water
and beef, I’m ready
to leave this cabin
behind, to lie down, no head
or arms, just Milk Force
streaming downhill
toward the lake
_____________________________________________
Garth Graeper is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, NY, and the author of two chapbooks, Into the Forest Engine (Projective Industries) and By Deer Light (Greying Ghost). Other poems in the Brother Cabin series have appeared (or will appear) in Typo, Handsome, Sixth Finch, Inter|rupture, Bitter Oleander, Leveler, Sink Review, and Sidebrow.