Four Poems from the Tortoiseshell Cahier
A GLOSS: AUTUMN GROUND
Oysters fey—
She is playing Ravel!
Mark the musculature
of the wrist
driving her thumb and index,
trace the muscle
at the heel of her hand
powering the fifth ("little")
and fourth ("ring") fingers—
Lemons yellow.
SONG WITH SOLAR PLEXIS
That mockingbird near Culpeper
knows a hundred tunes and versions.
As with a thousand miles.
The ten thousand sorrows.
A million in merkins.
*
Those black dots: "Coyotes
in the hills," Horse Heaven Hills.
Red dots "Lovers in the willows."
The steady Reiten, reiten, reiten
of the Rilke, Rilke, Rilke.
LORICA
That trusty time-tested
cottonwood-leaf hat, rustling,
sussing, chuckling just overhead.
SONG, OCTOBER 31, 2025
Yes, Keats' birthday—
Red fox has what crows lost.
Mountains make their move,
clouds live up to their name,
from Greek gloutos, "buttocks."
Those high-sailing futbols
in the Popol Vuh.
Merrill Gilfillan
Merrill Gilfillan was born in Ohio in 1945 and raised there. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1967, where he won the Major Hopwood Prize for poetry in his senior year. He attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years, studying with Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, and George Starbuck, among others. Gilfillan's recent publications include: Talk Across Water: Stories Selected and New (Flood editions); Old River, New River: a Miscellany (Red Dragonfly Press); A Walkable Rain (Oxeye Press); and Three Roans in the Shallows, One of Them Blue: Selected Poems, just out from Flood. He lived and worked in New York City for eight years, and then moved to Colorado, where he wrote several books of sketches from the Great Plains, including Magpie Rising, which won a PEN award. He now makes his home in Asheville, North Carolina.
Amy Renee Webb
Amy Renee Webb (b.1996) is a Mississippi born artist currently residing in Omaha, NE. During the first six years of her studio practice, Webb worked as a sustainable farm laborer in northern Mississippi. As a result, her art focuses on rural life; contemplating history, ecology, religion, and the psychological weight of growing up in the South. Webb’s work consists mainly of oil paintings and plaster reliefs on canvas. Her current signature works are landscapes imbued with acidic palettes, surreal textures, and intense perspectives.