Cally Conan-Davies

BIO

Cally Conan-Davies hails from the island of Tasmania, famous for apples and wilderness. She moved, for love, to the United States in 2012. Her poems can be read, now or soon, in such places as The Hudson Review, Subtropics, Poetry, Quadrant, The New Criterion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southwest Review, and various online journals.

 

Can’t. Can, too.

The curve of her half-smile is not unlike
a scythe. The way he leans on the ladder-back
chair is something very like a cat,
demure, before the fur stands and the rat-attack.

Most people never take time to think that a crack
or chink need not indicate a spot inclined to break.
There’s more at stake than a fix or a mate. Look
to the less and the lack, those who speak kind of quaint.

Me, I’m a little bit like a kite, caught up
in a current, content the moment before I’m cut
then suddenly the somersault and tangled strings
fighting the wind, then smack, my colors crash,
but like other things, most capable when I seem least.
A paper sheet flies creased and creased and creased.

 

Harvest

In vast solitude, stained and unadorned,
bent on one knee, a monk pulls thin weeds
from the vines below the wall of the monastery.

Deep in the grape is the name of another country
the stomach can’t distinguish.  This, the nose can do.
Chew, spit, breathe through, alive to the finish.

.

August Moon

Grey-faced as worlds

flow fast away,

for worlds are done

with every day

for minds hot-wired

to the sun,

her news is blue,

her borrowed light

softens the truth.

The truth is night.

 

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