Poetry by H.M. Cotton

H.M. COTTON is the managing editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both journals. Her writing appears in places such as Greensboro Review, storySouth, and Terrain.org. She teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a student at Warren Wilson’s MFA program for writers.

erosion

one week later and the shoal lilies
still wear the judgement of the flood—
though upright, overnight buds finally
open, their silt skirts mark a reminder
of what happened here—

upstream, we plant shallow-rooted
things: uniform expanses of perfectly
cut and useless green—congratulate
each other (for what?) a lawn like this
won’t welcome water back to the deep
seat of belonging

the sycamores in their architecture
of limbs anchor into fleeting banks—
bark busting with growing pains, they
counterweight quick enough to not
give way immediately—though the long
arc protracts to parallelism, kisses
the river before falling in

the second law says we entropy, we
dissolve, we are unmade through our being—
rivers shallow over time, and all is washed
eventually—i take a little water from the river
and bathe a lily leaf back to unmarked green,
and though this act can wash the mud
away, even still, the root remembers

Nevertheless

At baptism, Pastor Billy laid
fingertips wet with holiness
on my head—proclaimed
me “saved,” and I kept
waiting for my heart to stir.
Figured when the Holy Spirit
got a hold of you—you
felt the newness somewhere.
I had caught the fever
before—see, fervor slips right
up under your collar when
the choir hymns hallelujahs.
I churned through all the red
words—the black ones too.
Front-to-backed that book
in five versions and still
the spirit sat as unperturbed
as a bull frog in shallow water.
And so, I turned loose my hold.
The world grew small
enough to pill bug under a rock,
and just this morning I caught
God at work re-spinning her web—
stitching a delicate thread
around an architecture of becoming,
shaping and reshaping
what we know of Grace.
And I felt that ghost rise
up in me like a feather-dampened
flyer stirring from the hollow
of a hickory—winging
away into the night.

I would wish that you were here,

and if you were, I’d take you out back
to forage for chanterelles. Show you
how to place their name through
their shape, their veins, the cream
center I’ve learned to crave. Gather them
to cook for later in a butter sauce,
toss them in with pasta. But before all that
here in the lush green greenness
of late summer’s unseasonable rain,
I’d ask you to take off your shoes,
step slower on the sodden ground and feel
the thrill of geology under your feet.
And you, hot and cotton-mouthed
with humidity would touch your tongue
to a drop of rainwater hanging
from a maple leaf, and I would wish
that it was me.

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel

way up there an ecru V egrets,
fans out, lands in a cypress bank
errant sway of paper napkins
across a sonic parking lot and away
to the river through rain, through
storm drain
on the sandbar strange
heron cuneiforms four-toe across
mollusk trails—middens of amble,
of piddlin’, of sucking marrow
out of mud and calling the whole
thing good
spring peepers run
rounds of scales alongside katydid
stridulation—sine and cosine, friction,
chorus, wheel within a wheel, the swamp’s
compendium throaty, deep, low,

a gator calls her mate and drags ancient
claws across umber flood-strewn silt
and into the brackish to breed, to shore,
to pack a nest of mud and sticks, to egg
and await the sun’s go and come and go
again, moon births
a crack, a churl,
the whole toothed world wheels
turning, turning, turning