white doe — an albino ripple
in a brown silk banner of running deer
wading the Pacific in Quintera — cold paprika
ocean sparks my ankles
a squelch of kelp beneath my feet, memory
of a friendship’s misstep — a beach walk blurred
across dark pasture of parcella, jigsaw lights
blink development; blight of golden arches
atop the road’s rock-shoulder, sand dunes
press white cheeks into a hot blue sky
hoots outside my window beg me
to rise and search the nutmeg-scented dawn
Yvan gallops past in black sombrero,
bandana mask, toy gun raised
a blue bowl, two found feathers — Tucuquere [owl]
and Queltehue [lapwing] — poems stall
mare and slender foal — milk and toffee
under Venus and a crescent moon.
Cynthia French is a Newfoundlander living in rural Nova Scotia. She has been writing poems since 2006 and has been published in Riddle Fence, CV2 and The New Quarterly. Other work has appeared on the website of the League of Canadian Poets as well as in the anthologies The Wild Weathers (Leaf Press, 2012) and Untying the Apron: Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s (Guernica, 2013).