Mangrove Forest
Fronds on palm trees knock
together, chime, rustle with birds
and waves, and the constant sun.
Last night rain broke from sky
suddenly, as from a wrenched seam,
and the ocean roared, an angry father.
Jump round, jump, jump,
London Bridge is falling down,
In the sand by his mother, the child
is making a model of something
he has seen. He digs industriously,
sometimes flipping a root and sand
into his mother’s face by mistake.
He wants to show how a developer
has bulldozed a Mangrove forest
to build a road by the water in Antigua.
The goats by the path so thin,
ribs jut out, pierce skin. They could
be starving and dying of
dehydration at the same time.
Goat by the roadside so thin,
ribs jut, almost pierce skin.
The banana quit sits on a cup,
yellow-feathers flicking.
Now most of the fish are gone
from the island, Antigua.
All the shells are gone
from the beaches on the island,
Antigua. Most of the animals
are gone from the island, Antigua.
Only the mongoose remains.
Most of the trees are gone.
Most of the rain is gone from
the island. Will the Antiguan people
be forced to leave and tourists
not visit anymore?
Pitched bodies of droughted
children, bellies distended, lips
no longer forming words, small hands
clutching nothing but dust.
Hush little child,
gentle your soul.
The wolf moon hovers
in the midnight sky.
Lips of Pedestrians
The going out I am talking about,
the cold wracking rain of April,
the thaw at the frozen door waiting,
and your walking body, walking
through, ephemeral, a total
wisp, forlorn disappearance.
The watery lines of the lit trees
bend forward in the steady spring wind,
and the cottonwood seeds twirl in air,
stick to the lips of pedestrians.
You were always going out, going out.
The door was just an old excuse
for you to walk through, as if the tires
of your car had not already burnt up the street,
a poseur in an old-fashioned photo,
pretending this departure was just
different from all the rest.
Margo Taft Stever, a graduate of Harvard University, is also a recipient of an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her full-length poetry collections include The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Achievement Book Award; Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019), shortlisted and honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; and Frozen Spring, Mid-list Press 2002 First Series Award for Poetry. Her latest of four chapbooks is Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019). Her first chapbook, Reading the Night Sky, won the 2002 Riverstone Press Poetry Chapbook Prize (introduction by Denise Levertov). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, including Plant-Human Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, Verse Daily, Cincinnati Review, upstreet, Salamander, West Branch, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets, Plume, and Prairie Schooner. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in the Connecticut Review, Minnesota Review, Rain Taxi Review, Home Planet News, New Delta Review, Calyx, and Poets & Writers, among other places. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center (writerscenter.org), and until 2024, served as co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. www.margotaftstever.com