When you make my mind up, you’re going to go ape. Let me tell you to write now. Every trick in the book.
Not that they are blue glass
beads strung on a glowing
copper wire, not that they are
the ratcheting of crystal
wrenches against bolts of
sandstone, the insects’ songs
are strung along the fence
of my courtyard nonetheless, the fence
that needs paint, the fence
growing soft with mosses and
the tendrils of trumpet vines
and the soft, gripping, pale-
green fingers of tree frogs
whose own songs are light nights
being blown into the shape of medicine
bottles, blue, plugged with black rubber
eye droppers and small enough
to be concealed in your hand.
Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, and The American Entomologist Poet’s Guide to the Orders of Insects. He is the author of The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009), Crazy Star (selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005), Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, winner of the 2013 Blue Light Book Award, The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press, 2015) and Pavement, winner of the 2016 Blue Light Poetry Prize.