Sonnet branches
The forearm of spring rests on the window sill
to the kitchen where I’m boiling opera for pasta.
This branch of spring is a real interloper,
a man’s arm covered in hard yellow blossoms,
No. 2 yellow, like a line of forsythia
in inter-winter-spring. Other sonnet branches
are scattered in the backyard, fourteen limbs
decked out in the darling buds of May.
The man’s branch intrudes through the open
window in early spring, so it’s a line in a poem.
Those italicized and underlined branches
about timeless beauty, a love w/out physical detail,
maybe the pivot toward writing and the writer,
I’ll have to pick up after them after dinner,
I’ll organize w/ a ladybug red wheelbarrow,
kindling for prose or a Triskelion.
From Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). Copyright © 2022 Alexandria Peary. Used with permission of the author.
Alexandria Peary
Alexandria Peary was born to an American father and a German mother in Dover, New Hampshire and grew up in her parents’ convenience store in central Maine. She received a BA from Colby College; MFAs from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and a PhD from the University of New Hampshire.