One of the entries for PreProfessional Conference

I wish we could post all entries from WC assistants. They were great. Here are two poems by Ivor. Ivor and Dan had pieces accepted.


thought I'd let you know

i’ve been thinking,
of the grouchy park ranger woman
kicking us out for climbing the rail, and letting the roar
of the falls call loud to us from the edge of wet rocks.

when you are still,
i’m always trying to match the rhythm of you, your breath
with my own soft and nervous
by the way you “enfold me”
inside the feeling of your freedom.

i watch your content smile rise higher than your ears
but cannot convince
myself the form of this feeling,
or the dormant wonder lying in the details of your blue eyes i once thought were green
or this thought that comes,
more potent than the “syntax of things.”
but there you, asleep in a sunset tree and i think
i’d be about you.

who are you with these sealed eyes
shutting me out
with the rising crease of your lips from something
deeper than you and i without the tags of being human?

you are always so free,
running into oceans to let waves break against you,
they can’t move you, no more than i can.
and i always chasing, one step behind
the you that stops to stare at moonlit trees in the summer night,
or following you over the rail in the rain to see the falls.



Speaking in Wind
by 3525

Yesterday, running blind-like into the wind
I heard it speak through fluttering caution tape.
I heard the wind lifting
brown lines, and scattered leaves
to its shape, an angry cloud
through the field of dirt behind the art building.

I stopped to watch through squinted eyes
the growing blur and suddenly a grocery store flyer
lifted past me,
slid across the cement,
rolled its broken rhythm
with each tap on the ground.

It crinkled in the bellows
until it too was drowned
in the flurry’s exhale.

Then the fall of stone on stone, the clanking
rocks and wheelbarrow draws my attention away
to trees whose swaying chatters a chorus
of shivering leaves.

Yesterday in the wind a leaf too could speak.