BONNIE STANARD - POEMS

Bonnie Stanard draws on her rural upbringing and an interest in history to write novels, short stories, and poems with credits in publications such as The American Journal of Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Harpur Palate, and The South Carolina Review. She has published six historical fiction novels and a children’s book. She lives in South Carolina.
See photo attached below.

​THE MIDDLE OF AGES

Some people say we eat fallout
if clouds travel from a nearby reactor
and rain on our grain.
They say we drink uranium,
but it’s measured for security
though a threshold
for the decay of neutrons
is given in unknown numbers.
 
They say the apple I ate for lunch
has gentrified genetics
with dual potentials
and besides that the byproduct
of bug spray is exterminating
us to extinction. 
 
Off the map, somewhere other than here,
reports arise that risk surpasses negligible.
Right above us, the atmosphere’s bleary
with cratered possibilities
that worry our ecosystem
and they say it
causes unstable DNA.
 
How much is not enough to understand?
When to begin and where to look?
They say even our dead
are damaging the dirt.

FIG TREE
​

It is scrubbed by rain
rifled by wind
hissed by snow 
crackled by ice
and in good time
seized by the sun.

Its three trunks puncture
the earth with stabs 
of root that drill underground
for provisions
for to hoist branches 
and billow leaves.

Spiny balls utter forth,
glare at sunlight,
and get especially fat 
as tiny flowers erupt 
inside each belly
and eventually attract 
wasps that crave 
its cave of flowers.
They draw in their wings
and squeeze themselves inside
where they die of their desire.

Through days of light and rain
the figs turn turkey brown 
and old in the stem 
and fall from the limbs,
reel to the grass, and lie there 
with not so much as a shiver.
Ants riddle their skins
and release what remains
of the belly and the wasp. 
The juice fades into dirt,
sweet, sticky, buzzing with bees.


​

​CARBON COPY

​Back at the genesis of protoplasm,
did an indestructible widget wedge 
into a chromosome of my ancestor?
Did it begin with the first Eve?
Does it launch at every umbilical
moment of separation
and grapple with our glut of gods? 

Did my mother inherit 
from untold mothers 
the obsession to see 
the beginning, 
the black eye 
of our universe? 

Did the silence of a setting sun
or the loneliness of a dying night
embed in her a permanent 
longing not satisfied by life?

Did she aspire to connect 
to a saltless kingdom 
where time only passes 
with her permission?

Did she lie in beds 
below the reach of moonlight? 
Did she wash her hands
with religious oils only
to be rejected?

With no record,  
no Holy Writ on Eve’s odyssey,
how will my mothers
rid their bones of coal dust?

How will I breathe for them  
if the past is immutable?
If tomorrow is infinite?

A NATURAL DECEIT
​

​Once I felt at one
with the sky. I thought 
I had inborn clouds, 
whether restless or calm.
I had in my blood
rain and sunshine.

I felt myself a part 
of the natural world
of trees and shrubs,
my leaves fickle
my roots thorny.
Congenital weeds 
such as crabgrass and spurge
gave me courage
and a gristly nature. 

“You love me, I know you love me!”
I said when winds kindled my cheeks 
and grasses flirted with my toes.

When I was young
I wandered about fields 
my father plowed and planted,
where oaks and pines printed borders. 
I took as favor the plash of rain,
the ticking of crickets,
the chomping of grasshoppers. 

“You love me, I know you love me!”
I said to kudzu that sprouted 
on the fence post.

In time I grew to understand
that kudzu grows gangly roots
that strangle fields.

SHALLOW AS A PEACH 
​

You pick it up
roll it over
to the ripe side
and take a bite.
The juice runs
through your fingers
down your arm
and dribbles from your elbow.

Its violated flesh
is plush against your tongue
and you tremble
for another taste
and gush into
another bite.

Nectar smacks your lips
with tang
and wakes up peaks
in your throat.
Its luscious scent
seduces your nose,
you suck the corners of your mouth
and lick at drops on your chin.

You sit and eat
and kiss your sticky fingers,
so juicy. 


​