Solstice, June 2018 by Charlie Malone


Say equinox without egg
then hold the sun in stillness
until hands burn sonora.
On the solstice 
glacial clock glistens,
robins browd the gravel lot
their clock starts too—
How long before children
before hatching before wretched
news dashes and are we waking?
Say solstice without son.
Say anemometer without
anemone, feeling the absence 
of breeze, contrails still in the sky
that particular blue bubble
flecks of clouds—we are working:
Awdl cawl, a cist, 
within our dim coracles—
Dream words unfluently
on the cusps of 
balance and extremity.




Charlie Malone grew up in rural Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. Charlie's chapbook Questions About Circulation is from Driftwood Press (2019) as part of the Adrift Chapbook Series. He edited the collection A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park with Wolverine Farm Publishing (2013) and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, The Sugar House Review, and Saltfront. Charlie now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University coordinating community outreach programs.





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