Ruth Ellen Kocher
Ruth Ellen Kocher 's work has been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review,The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, Crab Orchard Review, ninth letter, as well as other literary journals, and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She'r. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona's Fire, won the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was published by Lotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, won the Green Rose Prose and was published by Western Michigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, who also published her third book, One Girl Babylon. She has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
The Window Cleaner Dreams of Grass
A morning can be all about earth
and the epistles that spring from it.
Scene 6: The day is unremarkable. Magnolia
takes up flourishing in usual lushness.
it is summer it is summer it is summer
Window squares reflect crosswalk-lines
interrupt sky upon blue sky
upon blue
Scene 6: The smell, somehow undone, first picked
green, yes, but familiar to the body that takes it,
accords it light in a way
most opaque sifted
turned out
moss creek on her breath.
Epilogue:
Anatomy of a Mule
as the beautiful thing confers on the perceiver the gift of life,
so the perceiver confers on the beautiful thing the gift of life—Elaine Scarry
His cock spins that not possible
pearled ass clench useless swell
(a wolf in his chest ears back
fur bristled black white then gray)
nostrils tendril inward hollow the face
the straddled sternum’s cleft paddle
the internal walls indifferent
each in love with the ground’s small
eruption dust billowed at the gallop’s
clap clip slowly raised foot coming
back again always to earth’s bridge
straw’s give stone’s round resistance.
Doctrine of Release
i
Vector: a moment worth remembering,
traffic light, orange poppies choking a field.
ii.
Gravity: any closed conducting path, the way pines
lean as the day goes on, the earth asking them back.
iii
Resistance: coconut popsicles bought on your own. A lover.
Palm trees. You are lost. You are lost. You are lost.
iv.
Fundamental Constants: god/God/Jesus/Buddha. The eye behind you.
Landlord has a key. Housing and Urban Development.
v.
Coordinate Systems: magnitude and direction,
the yolk of an egg, its simple task, exposed.
vi.
Potential: rain meets and releases earth.
A flirtatious turn of marigold at 5 a.m.
vii.
Radiation: begin with an oar and find a boat, a boat
and a pond, a pond and a wood, a wood and a mountain.
viii.
Friction: movement inhibited. Burnt patches
of Kazakhstan in rows of singed grasses.
ix.
Momentum: slug, roach, maggot, moth,
beetle, worm, lice.
x.
Impulse: equal to the difference of momentum, a body
at two instances. Collision. We, moving with.
