Two Poems by Carrie Etter

The Dandelions

This room, my not-room, with its milk witches, 
its cankerworts, its Irish daisies in the framed 
painting, on the curtains, manifest in the feathered 
floofball of a lighting fixture: 
                 just how many wishes
                 am I supposed to make?

I’d never buy that painting, those curtains (though
the feathery lightball’s fun), that docility. No room
I make, whatever its comforts, murmurs, docile.
 
O my childhood had its lion’s tooth 
amid the crabgrass, the marigolds, the milkweed,
but this room lacks a horizon, a sense of prairie’s possibility
edging into vision, tornado or thunderstorm or

an abrupt clearing, a banquet of light.

Guitar

after Lorca’s ‘Guitarra’

The guitar of California,
of its deserts, 
rarely weeps. 
Like the cactus, it
conserves its moisture.
Still the guitar breaks 
the broad pink bands
of sunset into night,
into a black blued
by the presence of stars. 
The guitar cries
without tears into
the night, and the coyote
answers, sometimes
returning the music
note for note.
The guitar cries
for and against
the sky’s
impossible breadth.
It calls to 
the red-tailed hawk
in his easy sleep.
It calls to the cottontail
whose ears twitch
at the sound.
It cries but releases
no tears: imagine
the weight
of such a heart.

Carrie Etter’s most recent collection is The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Individual poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and the TLS.