Robert Carr | Phallus Sprouting Leaves

Phallus Sprouting Leaves: poems by Robert Carr. Number 22 in our Rane Arroyo Series.

[ cover image: Laurel by Ron Mohring ]

Publication:  September 12, 2024 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-16-7
$ 12.00

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, two full-length collections published by 3: A Taos Press—The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds, and Blue Memento, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books. His poetry  appears in many journals and magazines including The Greensboro Review, Lana Turner Journal, The Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts and a 2024 guest instructor at The Millay House Rockland.

My Plot of Dirt

after Octavio Paz

Spring snows pink lips and you, beloved
plot of dirt, take me to your lily-of-the-valley bed,
rest my head on rising falls of flesh-drift
and mudslide. I reach for your fumbling finger,
you fill my gut with pebbles, roots.
Lift me from your lowland, count half-children
oozing from this body in the heat.
We’ve turned to our sacred-selves, stones
arranged as boundaries, barbed-wire gardens
protecting nothing but the early chive.
Have you noticed? We’re waxy, wrapped
in quilts of checkerberry. Pulled into your frost-
heave, I’m bitter in those snows of weeks ago.
Hyacinth pushes through sprigs of spearmint
and other invasive fears along your flank.
Flurries of white daffodil, handfuls
of crystal bonnet, fingernail-pinched and plucked
to bless my black-tipped frostbite.
I’m the only meat. Blood pudding on the broad
chest of your lawn. There are no feathers here,
no furs. In this verdant life, I sense the absence
of flesh outside myself. You’re my soil of many
textures, brown and green desire, composted,
light catcher of dust, my season without bees.
I turn you with a shovel, tease you with a smooth
oak handle. I’m perennial winter, dried herb,
and ours is impending vegetation, smoke
rising from a tree that doesn’t grow unless it burns.
Unfurl the naked fiddlehead of Christmas fern,
hooded Jack-in-the-pulpit. These petals haven’t
crystallized, my snows are not perfumed cherry blooms.
I pray, icicle tongued, to your peeping heads. 

[ Thanks to the editors of Solstice Literary Magazine for first publishing this poem ]
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