D.E. Steward

 Masticate

Shaggy white-tailed deer holding in
Their winter yarding site near to
Wooded office blocks where back
From lunch closed with cocaine rush
Somnolents sit nipples in their ears
Shoes off in warm cubicles oblivious
To the inquisitive and hungry herd
Just out there in deep winter’s stress  
Each morning watching cars sweep in
Braking for the nearest empty slot
Off audio and getting out as nearby
Deer chew on twigs for bitter bark.

Apparencies

Skinny Swiss tourists with spike heels jazzy
White dresses vinyl zebra-striped tote bags 
Mustached men in shiny gray leather pants
In la grande pomme for ten days of indulging  
Thirty years old like sixteen without the angst
Nearly sure if you’re Swiss and don’t know why
Your life is so relentlessly the same at home 
Big rich kids old enough to understand it all
But no savvy accrued of the world outside

Water-glass Skies

Skyline left eerily haunted by
The hint of more Nine Elevens
Against the city of our lives
Turned back down onto itself
In Elizabeth B.'s weak white sky
"an immense city, carefully revealed,
made delicate by over-workmanship"
With its target zones enhanced
We're never sure what else waits
Behind the impervious mask

 

D. E. Steward writes serial month-to-month poems with 353 months to date, has published many of them and a lot of fiction and poetry, along with a novel, Contact Inhibition (1985), before he began on his months project thirty years ago. Evan S. Connell’s seminal Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel and Peter Handke’s Paris writing got him started on the months project.