Some Evening Music
For it is not money but freedom of mind
I want
my bikeride and pink skiffs of air
through the pine line
the whole strike of sundown
seared clear over wheat all burned
just for me exactly
my words brought out
of the bottle
I don’t need my own eyes
on them I need you
O my companion
my brother in the blue coastline which is sky
my neighbor walking his Golden Retriever after the storm
description like a TNT
hues a tunnel through the given
I’m fat on my own song
you are my jester
O variation O sleet tones of blue O cross hatches
of white struck clouds steady advance of midnight
in the slow slide of rain
you are the answer
to my answer
like a birds nest I am built
line by line
where one of them opens
a beak to sing
Mouse Trap
I open the cellar door, the mouse trap’s bent
the mouse an S by cracking exactly
the middle of the spine. I’d seen him
on the counter Monday making for the left-out rye.
His eyes not unlike my dog’s,
fear and need in small brown spaces,
and too I see myself in them, helpless recognition.
We lived for some short time inside this same
old house and ate December bread in the year
I thought I’d faded like a season. Where were you?
It was cold. For the first time, I figured how to put
the hold-down-hammer bar delicately into
the catch and caught with fucks my own
peanut butter covered finger more than once.
This was the price of freedom and clean counters.
This, and lifting the door to see dead the creature
cute and cracked and cute even in its crackedness
and feel at once a shame and…what, satisfaction?
I had found another way to live alone,
some violence I had wound but didn’t execute
and having found out now had overcome—
except here, telling this to you, the kitchen clean,
the dog fed, I wish now to be judged, found
guilty, twisted and tongue tied until I confess how
I have for myself made this house possible.
I’ve sat and scribbled and have set to kill
and succeeded without seeing. In that it calmed my dog,
prepared a place for you—the break was no less
brutal—I set the death with love.
Caleb Braun's poems have appeared and are forthcoming in POETRY, Best New Poets 2022, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.