Christ Child with a Walking Frame (Back side of Christ Carrying the Cross altarpiece Hieronymus Bosch, 1480s) Christ of the fine hair, you toddle! Find balance with a walker. How does Earth feel on uncalloused skin, lodged under delicate nails? One intact hand raises a whirligig, foretells the cross you carry on the other side of this board. Sidelong glance, ear preternaturally large. And your lips— half a millennium you’ve almost spoken. The tawny blush of European flesh gracing your lead-white skin reflects the fiery rust surrounding your sphere, which is dark as the depths of space, half-lit with misaligned stars.
Wisteria Wisteria— wed to gazebo— holds the steel that holds it.
Rooting Soil, a pot, a window nearby—these thin green shoots should be so lucky. Instead, the faucet’s cold dousing when their pickle jar pond evaporates too far. A wet mess of Medusa roots thickens at the bottom, thumbing around for something to grip— humus, stone, stick. Stems struggle toward sky’s jagged orbit: sill till the blind comes down at night, then countertop. Back to sill next day. Leaves turn and turn their little necks to try and catch the sun. Always edge-on to the light, sloshing.
During the Pandemic, an Emergency Room Makes Space for My Mother Palm fronds dance a mad, intoxicated flamenco to surf’s relentless beat. Wind calls the moves. Turtles—a mass hatching— scramble toward storm-rent refuge, flying green foam. Months ago elders left their trace. Swim now in a different season’s salt. Palette of aqua, olive, pine and quartz. White-black seabirds feast on hatchlings navigating vast tangles—weeds ripped from holdfasts, spit upon the shore. Tomorrow, under quiet sky: waves lap empty sand. Walls of pale brick bake in the sun. Glass doors release conditioned air.
Kelly Lenox (The Brightest Rock, 2017) writes, translates, and imagines sleep in Milwaukie, Oregon. Her poetry, translations, and prose appear in Poetry Daily, Cold Mountain, Split Rock Review, RHINO, EcoTheo Review, Stony Thursday Book, and elsewhere in the U.S., Ireland, U.K., and Slovenia. She’s a science editor for the National Institutes of Health and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.