Brent House writes in Cedartown, Georgia, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and newborn son. His poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor for The Tusculum Review. Slash Pine Press published his first chapbook, The Saw Year Prophecies.
Augur of Birth
Dark rings burst thick with sweetness as if moon shone down from heavenstill before coming shadows of limbs break against a pane so thick
memory dulls wounds calling
alarm & distress aggression & defense flight nest & flock feeding & pleasure
a suckling bursts through visions of stars & bloods rising among waters aches
among such passages laughter open fields laid with stone & amazed by flowing
seeping abundant light gathering like paper against a platen
waiting for the daisy truth that we must love each other
amidst laden hills rising to feed woods restful with roots latched to their sustenance.
Augur of Threads
We sowed into the landclaimed us. A family dirt poor
past starvation a black field
we passed among generations
until each acre was drained
& then took work in towns
to requite a tax of inheritance
a blood pulsing with a future
made in the image of wars
where we met distant cousins
we shared screen porch summers
cool soils of a childhood
with first cars of spools
& later gravel roads
we unraveled like threads
away from our bobbin past.
Pastoral
I & the pastor’s sons in an antique Ford
after a fifth of Everclear & late for evening
worship looking through a baptismal falling
the darkness of a Labrador
without rein crossing into a path of light & steel
blinded until the touch of force & flesh
caught between the surface & the tread pouring
entrails in the wake as the red light of brakes
disperses in the midst
ran to the broken body ground on our knees
too intimate the suffering & ragged pulse
& the body of blood demanding
the twelve gauge of its double aught casings
& burnt oil washing from the pavement
in a gift of prism.