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BIO
Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at UMKC and lives with his wife, Lili, in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in over 50 different magazines, including New Letters, Pamplemousse, Fourth & Sycamore and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is published from Glass Lyre Press.
Farewell to Welcome Road
Anticlimax of cloud cover cold
wind balcony again
after sunlight cherry
blossoms, my weight shifts
toward home. Theo fills
his bowl with coal
dust potting soil.
A megaphone regurgitates
the same call, the same tired
song. It sounds like:
what I said, what I said.
My wife’s temper worsens.
A kingdom of ancient buses
runs below our garden
of green onion chrysanthemums.
Eats, excretes passengers.
There are no stops along Welcome Road.
Somehow the drivers know when,
for whom to stop. Pistons gasp.
Apocalyptic eardrums, earthshattering
horns. The drivers know
what I don’t. When it’s time to come.
Time to go.
Raking Leaves
I want to comb the leaves
out of the green hair of the lawn,
brush out the clumps of oak and maple,
stalks of hay from the clipped bale,
the stuffed dog house. If one of us
must work in the dark corner, the crux
where pickets meet and shadows
converse, let it be me. I love
the moss that cushions
the severed roots of yesteryear.
I would peel the dank bandage
of matted leaves, poultice of mud,
air out the wounds that want
for lack of sun. While my little brother
chases tatters back and forth
across the lawn, leaf blower shrieking
in his hands, I would unearth
ice-encrusted dog turds and burst acorns,
allow the strokes of my tiny green rake
to become rhythmic as story,
repetitive as mantra, sink into cadence
and lose myself in hard work.
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