Mirjam Frosth - Four Poems

Some questions

Is God the reed or is God the hand bending the reed
Am I the flat gray river always nodding forward 
Am I the deer drinking from it
Will it all crash down like they say
They ask questions they say Are you happy here
Are you a Christian The questions are for themselves 
Are you having kids Did you hear about the world ending
When are you going to do something about the world ending
It’s a pallid day in the north when you teach me 
to skip stones There are thousands of stones
There are thousands of hours There is no sound 

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Photo of an anhinga my dad posted to Instagram today and the caption

In my garden this afternoon!
I cut grass! She is drying her wings! And we don’t
bother each other!

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Florida Poem

Spring roundup: mystery beetles, sticky looking, three; one hundred thousand lovebugs, dead on the driver’s side floor mat; wasps, too many and too close; trespassing cockroaches, foreign and domestic; musky dark tile schoolways; the air like throbbing molasses; magnolia, palm, and the oak in need of a shave; the lesser blue heron, who resents that name; gorgeous all-encompassing warmth; horrible all-encompassing warmth, hyacinth doubling every day in the canals; why is there carpet in a bar; why is there a porch you cannot put furniture on; why are you looking at me like that in the grocery store;

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Sweetwater

You run a bath of brown water, 
add palm fronds, and forget, for now, 
until morning, when you wake up
to your porch overgrown with cattails.
You’re a brown and scaled thing.
Gambezi, round-bellied, dart
beneath the couch. A toadfish groans 
from the green armchair.
You’ve been old for thousands of years.
It’s this which cues you to make a bed
of sunken leaves, lean up against
the great toadfish, your oldest friend, and sleep.
Sleep long and dark and dreamless.