• Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
MER – Mom Egg Review
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
MER – Mom Egg Review
You are at:Home»Curated»Isolation»Tina Kelley – Poetry

Tina Kelley – Poetry

0
By Mom Egg Review on June 13, 2020 Isolation, Poetry

Tina Kelley

 

Wolf Tree



Alone in a field, it grew
in every direction, asterisk

of wood. If it were fireworks:
chrysanthemum, crosette, palm, peony.

If emotion: surprise, joy, optimism.
If vocabulary: fractal, excrescent.

A philosophy: If growth stops
in one direction, try the other.

Lean up from gravity.
Make more and lower branches,

holes, snags, shelter. Home
to invertebrates, thirty times

the birdsong of skinny trees,
sixty percent more mammal scat

than in crowded upstart copses.
Sieving the wind for spare kites.
Named for its lone-ness, its greedy
stance towards sunlight, the one tree

left for shade in the field, it’s often
crowded by riotous saplings, shaded,

obsolete, soggy, mossy where light
once shone, pinnacle, now decrepit.

Leave my ashes in your daddock,
rotten tree-hollow, let me rise up

an inch a year, nestle downy woodpecker
chicks and termites. Let me belong again.

 

 


Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in October. Her earlier books include Abloom & Awry (CavanKerry Press, 2017), Ardor, which won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition, Precise (Word Press, 2013), and The Gospel of Galore, (Word Press) winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award.

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleEllen Kombiyil – Poetry
Next Article Jen Karetnick – Poetry

Comments are closed.

November 27, 2023

MER Poem of the Month – December 2023

November 18, 2023

MER Bookshelf – December 2023

November 17, 2023

Small Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich

November 17, 2023

Where My Umbilical is Buried by Amanda Galvan Huynh

November 17, 2023

What Small Sound by Francesca Bell

November 17, 2023

Arboretum in a Jar by Frances Donovan

November 17, 2023

A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang

October 30, 2023

Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

October 30, 2023

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

October 30, 2023

Poem of the Month – November 2023

Copyright © 2022 MER and Mom Egg Review
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submit
  • Contact

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.