Inner Crowd
F. Daniel Rzicznek

We stumble into memory and before
we recognize the gate, we are half
                way through, and there are two does

leaping through the high tangles of marsh
and the buck stands
                                          staring out at us:

our tall shadows, the mind inside the mind
that he can hear
                                    rumbling above the wind,
even as he disappears into the brush.

                                          ~

Three times this morning
                                                  the farmer’s dogs
play sadness across the forest’s spines—
at first we thought coyotes
                                                      then

their whimpers descended, something
half lame as they echoed into the lake—
                into the slow circlings of fish.

                                          ~

The first man to move falls, drives gravel
through his knees, and the woman beside him
sets a small bag of money
                                                  ablaze, the light

revealing a multitude of faces stretching
back toward the one-way door of pleasure.

Gestalt
F. Daniel Rzicznek

Hackneyed… she had said aloud and light dipped down between branches beneath the window. The buildings borrowed grey from the grass. The grass asked for green from the bricks.

Nowadays men scroll past haggard in boats on the covers of books, and the mail is a thing with bridles and hair. I’ve pulled every last shred of paper from the walls—their beige now a vertical beach. A few nail holes represent trepidation.

I couldn’t find a single decent apple in the whole grocery store, but a few hornets came drifting awake inside a salmon fillet, harassed the packaging. The things we survive in the name of evenness.

Several states after the mountains, I began shouting about the clouds above the road: the violet skull they lightly formed. My shouting was like a little onion filled with sand. An eye in each of my parents turned backward, asked me would, couldn’t, I please think to relax.

F. Daniel Rzicznek's first full-length collection of poems, Neck of the World, was the winner of the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award and will be published by Utah State University Press this year. He is also the author of the chapbook Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The New Republic, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Mississippi Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He teaches English composition at Bowling Green State University. His current front porch is an open-air concrete block trimmed by a flimsy cast iron railing (attached to an otherwise lovely house). He wishes his porch was large, covered, and wooden (not unlike a bridge) with several rocking chairs, an old-fashioned porch swing, and a happy old dog thumping its tail against the boards.