April
By Craig Kirchner
I’m waiting on a muse,
it’s no electronics day,
and I’m stymied by Sunday’s crossword.
I opt to pretend to be a poet -
legal pad, pencil, and coffee -
but it seems this early, the potted plant
across the room has more vision.
I go for a second coffee,
looking to Keurig for a thought.
I could read, maybe steal an idea,
the new Atlantic is sitting right there.
One of the themes of no electronics day
is no news: no Donald, politics, or war,
to drive the blood pressure up.
The last three days of April
it turns out, were mating call days,
in the woods behind the condo.
My first guess at this new noise
was an owl, or maybe a racoon,
but this was an afternoon performance,
and they are both nocturnal.
There seemed to be two -
would start melodic and end sounding like
wash boards rubbing together.
The third day, a symphony starts,
two now seems like a dozen.
There’s one behind the air conditioning unit -
it must be frogs, or cicada-like.
Then, like the concerto climax,
just to my left, behind the drainpipe,
a green tree frog, throat billowing,
is using the aluminum as an amplifier -
in mating, loudest is best -
he found his muse,
and May 1st there wasn’t a peep.
Craig Kirchner is retired and thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems in a folder on a laptop. These words tend to keep him straight. After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Poetry Quarterly, Decadent Review, New World Writing, WordSwell, Vine Leaf Press, 7th Circle Pyrite, Ariel Chart, Blotter, Bombfire, Borderless Crossings, Cape Magazine, Carolina Muse, Chiron Review, Coneflower Café, Dark Winter, Edge of Humanity, Fairfield Scribe, Fixator, Flora Fiction, Floyd County, Gas, Ginosko, Globe Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Impspired, among others