Dogs in Snow
“Here is the dog planet at last where all is running/and sinking, rising and running again—/lessons in flight./To those mad glad beasts/all is cold and holy clouds/and certain sacred sky.”—Ashley Crout
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—September 2018—Poet Ashley Crout was born in Charleston SC, and graduated from Bard College and the MFA program at Hunter College. She is the recipient of a poetry grant from The Astraea Foundation and has received awards from The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation. Her work has been published in Sojourner, Ponder Review, and Dodging the Rain, among others. She lives in Greenville, SC, with her hell hound, Hud.
Dogs in Snow
By Ashley Crout
for Marty and Bear
After years asleep in the God sun,
it wakes in them
to pull like sled dogs against the leash,
gripped on nothing but the white of ice
that the human call powder.
But, to the dog, this is
the solid expanse of a new world.
And so the dust lifts under each
clawing step and then the shock
of its deepening – the animal heat
melting and compressing
the fragile snow in its mouth.
The world has vanished. Here is the dog
planet at last where all is running
and sinking, rising and running again –
lessons in flight.
To those mad glad beasts
all is cold and holy clouds
and certain sacred sky.
Blood Oranges
By Ashley Crout
This must be the tougher skin you mention,
the one that covers this thick fruit,
reddened as the sun farthest west
before it sinks,
a head full of breath held under
the waterline to its eyes.
Their sticky white membranes
like drained veins
clutching a nest of blood
in their netting.
The juice runs like a cut –
its bright lines down my neck,
its limp muscle in my hand
the size of a heart,
chamber by chamber,
stilled and taken.
Note: “Blood Oranges” was first published in Dodging the Rain.
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)