Levi Bentley: Bucolic Ecologues - 3 Poems
curdled milk enow
there’s one more early memory here of sewing the red X
in cloth diapers at the mission hospital to give new
mothers marking as property our cover while starting
a church converts there risk arrest i am
five when we return to the states now my mother is sewing
alterations
into hand-me-downs reading settler-fiction at bedtime the
button tin and the Singer, our sewing machine comprise
a non-game winding the bobbins threading all the eyes
setting a tension that hums breaks jams and snaps
like the room when my fxxxxx enters slack then snapping
i enter the picture coiled unspooling leaving
snarled
a rat’s nest of knots taut beneath the
gears of this
bid the woods
vasostructure / a stretch webbing / pinnately
/
compound palm / oak falls /
damp / handed pile
/ raked / rip / along vein
/
wax taught reed
mounds of wet oak leaves cold reddened raked
and bordered by thick waxy salal hedges with
black berries beside childhood home old
white siding yellow trim in washington
state i learn aloneness with sticks moss
slugs chickens meat rabbits mulched
leaves big wet hands raised against
grey sky green fields steel grey sea
climb a sticky ponderosa pine to be
above roof ridge for hours being
forgotten a home garden a deer
fence in the town name truncated
klallam for “quiet water” sounds
like “skwim” like something you
don’t want to happen temperate
desert surrounded by rainforest
settler history begins there 1850
incorporating into township in
shadow of logging and railroad
boom and bust a log camp then
farmland until the 1950 green
revolution makes small farming
obsolete and california begins
retiring there my grandparents
and others bring chain stores the
year i leave a walmart a median
age of 62
makah whaling rights won in 1999 are exercised
and then voluntarily suspended but in high school
for several years someone brings in ziploc bags
of blubber for show and
Levi Bentley organizes the reading series Housework, edits the journal Boneless Skinless, writes for Artblog, and is a member of the artist collective Vox Populi. "Bucolic Eclogue" was released from Lamehouse Press in July 2016. Chapbooks "Obstacle, Particle, Spectacle", "&parts", and "Stub Wilderness" were released from 89plus/LUMA Foundation, Damask Press, and Well Greased Press, respectively. Vitrine released their tape "Red Green Blue". Poems have appeared through 491, Apiary, Bedfellows, BlazeVOX, Boog City, Elective Affinities, Fact-Simile, Gigantic Sequins, No Infinite, Madhouse, Maestra Vida, Magic Pictures, Painted Bride Quarterly, Small Po[r]tions, Stillwater Review, The Wanderer, Tinge and Truck