Eileen Cleary is the author of Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate Press, 2024) long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, 2 a.m. with Keats (NixesMate Press, 2020) and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, JAMA, Right Hand Pointing, Verse Daily and other journals and anthologies. She founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books.
Raptors
Even scrunched under the sheets, next to the last
birth sister the state let me keep, we were not alone.
The Burke’s real daughter Joanie switched on the lights,
snatched her 8 Track, which up until then we’d only known
could play You and Me Against the World. She told us
we’d been caught whispering. And so, the shame.
The truth. I’ve never been that scared. Later, summoned
for a playback loop of I want to go home, don’t you?
and a mix of prayers, my foster family glared.
To think, the ingratitude for all their beef stroganoff.
You can bet that God knew too. No wonder, look
at their mother & Now we know who you love more,
sounded for all the world like we were unlovable.
It would be easiest to say we learned why chicks
shouldn’t sing with hawks circling but that’s
only half true. We were never really birds.
Of Mice and Men
Lennie loves George more than he could love any
ranch or rabbit hutch. More than a sack of alfalfa.
George shrugs and leaves big Lennie the bigger share
of their fire-cooked beans. Lennie could hole up
in a cave of that love. He loves that little man more than
the windmill he’s been slaving for, a red one
with wooden blades that calls water to wash his hands
clean. His is the clumsy love of one who can’t imagine
killing anything on purpose, even though he’s always worrying
the body of some small animal. It’s the immaculate love of one
who never heard a dove whistle mercy across the heart’s waters
and so never pays the toll of setting someone free.
To Become California Buckwheat
for Deborah Leipsziger
To wheel inward
trying not to spill ourselves
as we catch the sun
full-on,
fixed in clay—
To wear an ancient sweater
while storkbites
pink our newborn skins,
to gather bivouacs
of metalmarks.
To home
a fluffle of rabbits
and ground squirrels,
big-eared mule deer
browsing.
To green into food
for dark-eyed juncos
and finches,
poised in the wings
of the wildlands.
Clouds
for Mary Buchinger
Sky-eyed:
Cyan Surfing,
a water color
( )
assemblage of
weary animals
Off- leash & Otherwise.
( )
What birds might knit your songs,
Dear Crystal Weavers?
( )
Relapse and remit–
Despair?
Or hope, fevered.
( )
Bring your sails to our feet.
Cheer us.
( )
Ambassador,
bring from the steeples
the news from Cirrus.
The Galway Review 