Ange Mlinko

Three mini ciabattini for breakfast
where demand for persnickety bread
is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast
recalculation of my overhead,
...

I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irish
and/or Maghrebi. But it's Breton, as I can swear
by the blue hydrangea like a cloudy iris
...

Here I am saying "The leaves are falling"
—one of those choruses
that vie with interminable verses
to mock hoarders.
Yeah, we get
...

The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends.
We scanned the haze for lightning.
...

The flight attendants
go
from kore to semaphore
...

In someone's distant algorithm
your mortgage was bundled to another's
—hedged—
and stamped a new "security."
...

I wake to light jackhammering, and news
follows: a plane
failed over the sea. All want to go home, but drastic curfews
obtain from a meridian.
...

If you'd seen
the Gaillardots' mullein in the Cedars of the Shouf;
if you'd seen the Aleppo dock, red with iron,
in Bcharre where the Adonis River's said to run as red
...

I


Should I take this time, while the children are in school,
to untrim the tree? Standing in the dish we let go dry,
...

Lobster in the bathtub. Christmas Eve.
Scrub the tub first. Hand off cleanser.
Rinse well. We don't want Comet
in our lobster.
...

If an orchidophage's tastebud magnified
resembles an orchid
so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones.
...

Two flags nuzzle each other in the desultory gust
because they are
fleeing the trees, who are cruel to one another,
shading their neighbors to death
...

Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart—
Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer.
In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed,
...

'I thought of you as a butterfly tonight,' getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's.
And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face.
The jeroboam trees are dark tonight.
...

A levitating anvil. Omen of seagull
blown inland. Ranch gate said Riverstyx,
but it was the woodland that looked lethal:
...

It's you I'd like to see Greece again with
You I'd like to take to bed of cyclamen
You know I nurse a certain myth
about myself that I descend
...

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge
and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch,
no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange
drawing a rope, horizon's doubledutch.
...

They sang Green, Green Grass of Home
sailing west from New Orleans.
They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite
...

From the weathered boards knots pop
like the eyes of potatoes. From brick
salients not a clink of a pupil in a loop-
hole. Cannon, yes, but without their kick.
...