Poems by Natalie Tomlin

Backyard

by Natalie Tomlin

From Canary Spring 2019

Natalie lives in the Grand River watershed in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

South Pacific clownfish unsheathed pink razors
and anemones flared life into toothbrushes
until the scrubbing arms of coral elbowed her awake.

On her island, she had staged
a reef around her boy, especially
for Spring: grass-green slide, a worm on wheels,
shovels that now raced across lawn
like fins, ready to burst into

a festoon of shards. She asked
the ticks, plastered into
unseasonably warm air:

who will toss our
indestructible confetti
when we are gone?

© Natalie Tomlin

Grubs

by Natalie Tomlin

From Canary Spring 2019

Later, I couldn't stop thinking about the skunk's claws digging, piercing all of that lustrous wriggling. I couldn't stop thinking of moonlight, blindness. But first I had to awaken to my drawers rifled through, to my yard dotted with shallow, marble-shaped holes. Cut a square in the earth. If the grass pulls out, as useless as a square of carpet, you know they're around. I sprinkle pellets and with the hose, bathe the lawn and the pearls nestled there. The package tells me, keep children off grass for 48 hours. It’s the day lilacs swell over the fence. First muttering in judgment, by mid-afternoon, they slide perfumed forgiveness through the air.

Temperature Blanket

Michigan: Local woman tracks temps while weaving a blanket.
A strand for every day of the year, reds and oranges representing the high temperature.

by Natalie Tomlin

From Canary Fall 2018

Find her after work, with a glass of wine and a needle, on the day it shoots to ninety-two degrees. She unpacks her dazzling yarn, exhales deeply as it uncoils. Decimated dandelions and tiger lilies pitch through October in a tidy vein as giddy teens corral shopping carts in t-shirts, dying grass prickles, cashiers chat in air-conditioned lanes. Weather as art: it’s impossible not to admire the orange ray passing through blues and greens. What year did we trick-or-treat in snow pants over our ballerina costumes? When did that ice shelf submerge just as bare-bellied genies trotted across lawns? Yesterday, a bat was discovered nestled inside a box of Organic Marketside Spring Mix at Wal-Mart. A wiry February Monday flares between our local woman’s finger and thumb. We clutch quilts, prayer beads as March first looms. But admit it—Spring can’t come soon enough. Let’s swaddle an April baby in this work of art.