Self-Help Picture Book
By Dylan Buckser Shulz
Lately I’ve been lying
on lawns, pulling up thoughts
by their throats like turnips.
Chewing loudly. It’s called
liberty. You ought to have
some. Yesterday I saw
a huddle of fuzzy goslings
and did the right thing—said
aww. I watched a runt foal
lick its mom’s muzzle. Thorns,
eating dead sage. Are we all
just riding time until tragedy
strikes? Don’t think about
your birthday. You are born
daily. Carry, through crowded
rooms, a quietude in your chest
like a static charge. This will
make you sexy yet untouchable.
Brush your teeth at night, only.
Soak in your natural sour when
you wake—it’s good for your
inner devil. Walk
a skinny unmarked path
through a wild meadow. Life will
stand around you. Don’t check
for ticks, but for beer glass, forsythia,
fox tail. Lost earrings. Pale, rustling
sky. Inhale, often. Let the world turn
our head on its little axis.
Late April Diagnostics
by Dylan Buckser Shulz
Shadows of ivy are blooming
in the small wood boathouse
stranded by a shallow pond.
Dim pain: I mistake the fields
between us for its units—stalks
and people swaying with their
hair bundled by rain, scattering
like kernels of light. Fetch the eyes
of a geologist who, for years, has
charted the drift of a glacial colony.
Note his irises, themselves noticing
no change. See, now, the sore flight
of a wan dove. In any bird’s final
takeoff—the animal offbeat, twitching,
like a defibrillated heart, toward the ether
—is a fight for natural freedom. To be
a student of light: looking east
from a hill at dusk, the next blue peak
appears, through the filmy mid-spring
squall, like a whale’s grooved back.
Along its spine the nearly budded trees
seem barnacles, soaking drizzle. These,
the shifts and glooms I must memorize.
Your gaze invents me, how sunrays
lay down black blossoms from all the ivy
in their way. The prong of a half-dead leaflet
reaches, unnoticed, through the oak frame.
Gold tinges it. I look back at you and wonder
where else have I ever been.
Click to see Dylan’s work in our Fall ‘23 and Spring ‘24 issues