SONNET FOR A GOOD CRY IN THE WOODS

Love is a babe, pig in the city
Like that scene in Amour
where they literally smother each other
It’s a whole zen thing, see
Another motorbike zooms wizardly by
Tulips like interrobangs on Park Avenue
Meanwhile I’m sorry I’m so sad
Everyone else is busy moving to Asheville
Oh, the shame of writing poetry
while my friends manually labor!
But I, too, have woke for the worms
I have eaten weeds, for the record
Take my picture with this bag of chips
Quick, I’ll never be this young again

POEM FOR A FERN

At an outdoor dinner with a hundred friends
at a furniture café called Relationships
someone played celestial harp music
from their phone over an invisible speaker
and I’m telling you I saw a fern dancing
suspended in a plastic wicker basket
from a threshold on the party perimeter
letting down its hundred green hairs

Chelsea Harlan holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Sixth Finch, Hobart, Southwest Review, The Greensboro Review, American Poetry Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She is the co-author of the chapbook Mummy (Montez Press, 2019), and the recipient of the 2019-2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize. She lives in Appalachian Virginia.