COLLIER NOGUES
Wake Day
owl pellets skirt the tarps across the barn’s second story
the wedding barn
originally dairy but now a wreath
a heart over its door.
there’s no blue like robin’s egg
cleared sky
all the way to the Seven Devils.
I wonder
how someone becomes a good pastor
even a small town
a wake a week.
death is a door, he says
or a second story.
the lake’s tame herd migrates over the creek
deerhide showing through the bridge’s
gothic cutouts
snow deep enough the deer drag their feet.
wake day, in the barn
the owls aren’t
when I look for them.
late winter’s when
they nest,
in afternoon elsewhere.
Collier Nogues is the 2010 Fishtrap Writer-in-Residence in Wallowa County, Oregon. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and has recently been a MacDowell fellow and a Ucross resident. Her first book will be published in Spring 2011 by Four Way Books, and poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Jubilat, 42opus, Nimrod, Barrow Street, Washington Square, and Third Coast, among other journals. (collier.nogues@yahoo.com)