Entropy of Spring
The sack of cracked corn is bulging and round
but slims as soon as I lift it
and kernels pour out in a liquified stream
through the hole where a field mouse has bit it.
After arranging our peony blooms
in colors that cluster and chatter,
I lift up the elegant porcelain vase
to watch petals tumble and scatter.
Even worse is my nose, a passage for stuff
like lava, contained by a faucet
until it escapes and reaches my lip
where only a tissue can sop it.
Then raising the lid of the washing machine
to take out my favorite shirt,
I find the remains of the tissue in shreds
that should have dissolved with the dirt.
Joyce Wilson is editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them Light, Lighten Up Online, and The Hudson Review. Her chapbook The Need for a Bridge and a full-length collection Take and Receive were both published in 2019. A sequence of poems, “The Octagonal Schoolhouse,” won the Samuel Washington Allen Honorable Mention Prize from the New England Poetry Club in 2023.