Poems by Dawn McGuire
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Not the Nightly News
by Dawn McGuire
From Canary Fall 2018
Dawn lives by a tiny riparian habitat in the Orinda Woods in Northern Calfiornia. She shares the land with a splendid gray fox who hunts there. Orinda was named in honor of Katherine Philips, the first woman in England to be acclaimed as a poet in her own lifetime: "the Matchless Orinda" (1632-1664).
This ransom idea has caught on.
The boot on your tire.
The loan on your home.
The war in your name.
Oh, and we have your daughter.
Her dinner is parsley and water;
her breakfast: Fitbit.
All day long in the mirror:
Scale and Gaze.
Your son’s in Khost Province
lugging ROTC debt and an 80-pound pack
that wrecks his knee.
Oxy works wonders in the field.
Back home, heroin’s cheaper.
Easier to get.
Rehab, relapse, rehab.
Every bedroom, ransom.
Every day the war.
© Dawn McGuire
Winter Sugar
by Dawn McGuire
for Monica Tranströmer
In November, the Northern Spring
Peeper (P. crucifer) turns to ice.
The kidneys in their tiny tunics
freeze; the liver in its capsule,
spleen in its sac, refrigerate.
The brain is a milligram of iceberg
in a helmet.
With the ears’ oval windows
frosted over, nothing sings,
but sleeps, hard as granite candy,
under litter leaf.
This far north of song,
the silence could be endless.
Ocean’s last lid.
But in the depths, where life
keeps its best silver, the cells
are filled with fluent waters.
A few extra molecules of sugar
become winter antifreeze. No ice
spikes form, no inner membranes
break, no essentials leak.
When the sun’s elliptic fire
crosses north again, the mute brown
shuck begins to thaw. The curious
X on its back for which it is named
no one explains,
but the heart’s three chambers start
to beat, and the brain’s dopamine
as always, promises a kiss.
So it begins,
the boreal chorus. Sweet-kept
and built loud; built to deafen
even death.
© Dawn McGuire