Kathryn Rantala: Two Poems
Danger | Margaret

Danger

The sun rose in a dangerous way and stayed
past noon that day we had sand and coffee
and did our little and large violences in a
colonial army kind of way. El Nino,
the child and father, burst on the coast
with a hot cry that made me edgy
but you said out loud you were
unutterably bored with cinnamon.
Childless through the nineties though cheerfully
bruising Baja and Peru, you let your mocha java
headline the portrayal of the dead fox I'm
wearing and your French cigarettes.
The poster ads hinted to mind the mistral
still singing you awry like the intentional
lines on the legs of your girlfriend
that day you told her you couldn't leave the war.

Margaret

Visited by a cruel humor
I put an end to that green yellowness,
spring.

I sit backward on buses
watching the fist pistons when we do not stop,
renumber the houses
for charity pickups
and laugh brightly.

Funny the sharp of the cup on a dry whisker.

I unadvertise events.
If I wish,
I uncalendar summer,
reversing the X's to June.
This is harder to do. I do it.
My eyes sink.

Funny the end of the morning standard.

See the extended heron knee
buckle above the nest?

Nothing good will come of me today.

Poet's Biography:

Kathryn Rantala's poetry and prose have appeared in or will appear in The Oregon Review, The Melic Review, elimae, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tundra, 100 Words, Connecticut River Review, Quantum Tao, Writer to Writer, Wind, The South Dakota Review, Fragments, Portland State Review, Mississippi Mud, Montana Gothic, Mr. Cogito, Invisible Cities, and others. A collection of prose and poetry, Missing Pieces, was published by Ocean View Press in 1999, following, by some years, a poetry chapbook, The Dark Man, from Longhouse Press, Seattle. She is a Seattle native. Her first poems were published in Spring Rain, Seattle, in 1974. In 1999, she founded a semi-annual print journal of poetry and short prose, Snow Monkey, which she continues to co-edit.