Wendy Insinger

Two Poems

Life on Mars

Up in the barn rafters

Life is good

Spider web and bird nest

Neighborhood.

Horse ears twirl, sly snakes scout,

Daddy longlegs and daydreams wander about.

Here in the sweet hay a lifetime lies,

Smelling of alfalfa and alibis.

“Where were you the day the world came to an end?”

Basking in the sunset through cracked wood slats,

Wondering and marveling at this and at that.

This Narrowing

The road rises up to meet the sky.

The earth flattens and rises,

Or, perhaps, the sky lowers to meet the earth.

This overcast lowering.

All I know is that there is less and less air to breathe,

Less space to be.

Sometimes, a star gets stuck, pants on the blacktop as its fires go out.

Sometimes, grains of dirt smudge the thin-stretched clouds, disappear into the ground.

I feel the nestling as animals retreat into their dens,

The reticence of trees as they suck back into their heartwood.

The uncertainty of lakes as they idle on their springs.

I feel the compressed static of electrical impulses jamming the synaptic gaps

In every human brain.

The way the space between heaven and earth narrows, leaving not much room

For breath or thought.

How we are imploding on our very own light beams.

How our light has become the source of the impending dark.

The feeling of atoms being pressurized until they split apart.

Wendy Insinger is a fiction writer and poet interested in exploring the crash-up between gender, history, media, and self-talk - the things that haven’t been said, the things we don't say and the things we don't think we can say. Currently, she is working on two novels, one about gender distopias and one set in the Bronze Age. She co-hosts Milkweed Poetry Workshop. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including: Common Ground Review, Chaleur, Anapest, Chronogram, River Poets Journal, Philadelphia Stories, and DIRT Magazine.