BEAUTY

The bouquet of white lilies you brought 

lasted exactly one week.  Their great wide mouths

collapsed around their pink throats, their once 

sturdy stems succumbed to the weight of dead petals. 

Pollen streaked my fingers orange as I gathered 

them limp and dripping from the glistening vase. 

Their fragrance lingered in the winter apartment 

for another three days, pungent as too many cloves 

in honey, or the wet/dry after-sex that stains 

my pillows and sheets.  Sex?  you ask. Yes, flowers 

are what I caress—time is collapsing around me—

won’t live my life without them.

WILDERNESS WALK WITH TOAD, FOX, AND SNAKE

The tap tap tapping of happy feet. 
The pounding of sexual rain.

Our thoughts finding each other in the swirling embrace
of storm clouds and wind.  The toad in the pond by the waterfall, 

its bulging gold eyes and silver-green warts. The snake 
in the labyrinth of tall dead grass, the sensual red stripe 

down its slippery black back.  The single blue egg 

in the robin’s nest, transformed into a worm-gulping beast.  
Home, in bed, you ask me to please brush your hair 

the way your grandmother did.  It’s soft, I say, 

unravelling ringlets of gold with my willing fingers. 
Flesh of you, flesh of us.  Rabbit in jaw, nose

in the air, fox scampers back to the storm-cloud wood.

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JIM NASON has published six poetry collections, including, Rooster, Dog, Crow which was short-listed for the 2019 Raymond Souster Poetry Award. He has also published a short story collection The Girl on the Escalator and his third novel, Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals, was recently published by Signature Editions, Winnipeg.

His stories, essays and poems have been published in journals and anthologies across Canada and the U. S., including Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008, 2010 and 2014.