Star Counting in Fairbanks & Elegy for a Resistance Quelled
By Cody Kucker
Star Counting in Fairbanks
Let us smoke. It’s August and night’s returned,
a denim pocket blotched by a bled pen,
wherefrom lint balls, somehow still white, emerge
one by one so we’re able to count them.
Six—and toothpicks appear between the stars,
epics animated across the ether
by way of Jove’s lust, by way of Jove’s mercy.
One gets to thinking—seven. Let us smoke.
Dozens are delivered now with each second,
as we sit sashayed in scraps of fireglow,
the sheen of our white teeth glinting with winks,
our arms igniting embers while we watch
bold stars coax far stars come but not too close.
Fine. Let us smoke and continue counting,
for as it gets colder there’ll be too many
and some will shine so tight they’ll look like one.
Elegy for a Resistance Quelled
Some nights I walk out on the ice, crouch down,
and drag a stick along the bog’s last breaths:
octopus-looking cracks, tentacled craters,
where bubbles from the bottom kept sudding
when cold had all but ceiled the pond’s surface.
I tap a timbered ditty for the end
of whatever’s struggle froze there, the thing
that must have spit a phlegm equivalent
to Skoal and blood, tooth-bit, up out of it
with what fury to break this thickening sheet.
Cody Kucker’s poetry has appeared in Rattle, The Carolina Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Natural Bridge and JuxtaProse, among others. He received his MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and lives in northeastern Massachusetts with his wife and son.