Lois Marie Harrod

They disappear for days,
the blue-enamel heaven
empty as a pot,
no ripe meat
rising in the kettle,
no random reek.
The canal where we walk
scrubbed of duckweed,
vegetable protein rot.

Then they return
wheeling the steeple,
cadaverine
putrescine
rising on the wind,
great trundles reminding
some somewhere
something is dying,
dead, climatic shift,
black plague.
We sniff our breath,
our armpits,
whiff nothing yet.

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About the author:

Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th and most recent collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks. And She Took the Heart (Casa de Cinco Hermanas) appeared in January 2016, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). Dodge poet and 3-time recipient of a New Jersey Council on the Arts fellowship, she is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Links to her online work at http://www.loismarieharrod.org