Andrew Hutto: 3 Poems
Mint
What I saw when your mouth opened up is the mint leaves
between your teeth.
I smelled them over my own cologne.
I went to clink glasses with you but my grip slipped with
the sweat. The crystal shattered on my shoes and
sliced my ankle.
Can you see the horse’s ribs? When they gallop?
I hardly noticed the sound above the loudspeakers,
how the fasting horses whinny for hay whether they
finish in last place or in show or wear the ribbon.
My sympathies cannot explain it away.
While I realize I am not the most sufficient
ambassador for their caked hooves
and flapping reins, I am certain
I saw a blue
jay perched upon a black-gum branch, nesting
in a robin’s nest. Her little ones starting to fledge.
I need a recollection of the past four seasons.
What year did they switch from live fire to blanks?
To Thy Work
I desire beyond the desire of you - into the Other, (a)
a post-hoc- interlocuteur.
Move through semblance into the necessity hesitation.
Frozen water in a dog bowl.
People we see ringing bells,
spirit as symbolic-object.
(— φ)
i(a)
Sacred as you are, a sneeze and a sniffle.
You are still a filter from which the imagined draws itself into being.
Be born again, on his swift wings.
The foxgloves are sprouting and the glance has caused an early death.
Weep for the mind-dependent narrowing.
You will not finish in the same position in which you started.
Hesitate in conversation, be gentle with it,
prune the garden and feed the squirrels.
The goat will be tied to the altar in time-future, but in this known-world let’s
see how deep the river is and how far we can skip a stone.
Harvest-Time
On these claims,
On these colors
we will hang wreaths — together.
We will fall asleep in our twin bed
under the flannel sheets.
I will show you how to pinch a blade of grass
between your thumbs,
and scream.
I’ll get a Ph.D. and we will grow tomato plants in the Cumberland Plateau.
There will be wheat bundles under steel buckets,
there will be paws in a saucer of milk.
Your jaw is going to be sore
from all those caramel
apples.
It will all exist closer, to those cobwebs
closer, to those cattails.
In a world where crickets sing on corn stalks.
Andrew Hutto is originally from north Georgia but currently lives in Kentucky. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Louisville. His poetry appears in The Thrush Poetry Journal and is forthcoming in Barnhouse Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, Eunoia Review, After the Pause, Amethyst Review, and Math Magazine.