from POEMS ABOUT MOSS

Leptogium corniculatum


Apothecia of longing
A threat is gathering out at sea
Wide rubbery lobes that curl into branches
Driftward
The good among us gather thorns




*




Anomodon minor


Old money, bells
Bison hunched like a cathedral
In circles underwater
Even the weather is infinite and bored




*




Bryhnia graminicolor


In the home life, shrill decurrencies
Ghouls and bugs of warless years
Cars we wash, cars we live in
Wet marble and the sound it swallows
In the winter voices
Harness young voices
Someone follows tracks crushed into the red coat of day




*




Tetraphis pellucida


Cup-like
The variety drowns me
Perfectly elliptical
New York City
Weed
Wetted
16-ribbed and counting




*




Brotherella roellii


A flightless face
Relocation efforts
Positive thinking, my chest of drawers
Your stones like water
Trust ascends and disappears into the




*




Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus

​
The museum would stuff us
BANG BANG
How can you not
Leaf-mother
The wrinkles are filling
We cannot even if wished to
End

​DENNIS JAMES SWEENEY’s prose and poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Five Points, Indiana Review, and Passages North, among others. He is the Small Press Editor of Entropy, author of two chapbooks of poems, and the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Malta. Originally from Cincinnati, he is now a PhD student in writing at the University of Denver.