Three Poems by Anca Vlasopolos

Duck Economies

technically i’m so inferior

binoculars
expensive for me
still under $five hundred
scope only
child’s toy
—reward
for thirty-five-years teaching

so i mostly

with frozen hands watery eyes
guess
           at beak color
           wing tip
           ringed neck
know regal shapes of canvasbacks
can tell horns and clarinets of tundra swans

when home

i google
thinking luminous close-ups
will vivify
my fading visual snaps

among the photos

of these serenes
—illusionists on lake skin—
one microsecond caught in lenses’ round
next arching
vanished as if they’d never been

i see shots

            of children triumphant
high-tech guns slung over shoulders
holding aloft
            dogs’s jaws clamped on
lifeless bodies

see carcasses

accompanied
by game cooking tips

This Mid-September Day

swollen with rain-to-be

stands so very still

canes of raspberries sway

with weight of bumblebees
sucking at late flowers

globes on the fuchsia that

            fatigued in summer heat
            held itself barren
impossibly hotpink
pregnant look on
to bursts of purple frills

hydrangea blooms long past

their prime
now move to green
unripening
as if to tell us
            despite crickets’ vibrato
            nests of yellow in the linden trees
there’ll be another
spring

Once in Seven Billion

on the grass median a modest family

Canada geese and two offspring

the gander did check out the coming car

could not conceive anything would move at such a speed

we on the other side horror-struck

forgot about the changing traffic light

watched as he herded his mate and goslings

into three lanes of fast-approaching cars

and then it happened

the first car stopped then another and another

for once some humans making up

our crimes of paving over other lives

stupid male got his small family

across to another grassy berm

all our machines took off

some drivers giving others the thumbs up

Anca Vlasopolos published the award-winning novel The New Bedford Samurai, the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement, two collections of poems, Walking Toward Solstice and Penguins in a Warming World, three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel, Missing Members, and over two hundred poems and short stories. She was nominated several times for the Pushcart Award in poetry and fiction. She is associate editor of Corridors Magazine.