Jacob Lee Bachinger

Backyard

after Thoreau’s “Spring”
 
As March rains disperse the snow, baring swaths of burlap grass, we see how the house has been turned wrongside out and the unwanted, orphaned scraps and trash banished from our rooms have found space here, sifting into leaf litter by the sagging fence, disintegrating greyly on Adirondack chairs, easing into earth among abandoned toys, sleeping by severed headboards and the Pollocked ladder resting on its side, joining empty garbage pails, hanging from the washline with winter’s forgotten mittens, dangling with a broken birdless feeder, thatching deeper into the grass undisturbed through the feculent spring.

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This first appeared in the author's collection, Earth-cool, and Dirty (Radiant Press.) 
 
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Ad Larem
 
You see them in thrift stores, those halfway houses before the museum or dump. Teacups that clicked when set into their saucers; ashtrays with stubbed-out scenes of Banff, Winnipeg, Niagara Falls; card tables with black metal legs that snapped into the lotus position; rotary dial phones like coiled snakes—how they rattled when they rang. Toothpick buckets, ancient breadbins, now-quiet coffee percolators, cut-glass candy bowls once home to antediluvian peppermints and licorice allsorts (candy you were offered but never wanted), and the occasional owl-shaped table lamp presiding over a cascade of Tupperware nearly tumbling from the shelves. You see them and realize that you had nearly forgotten, but who has not forgotten the household gods? As at the ruins of Pompeii, so at the neighbourhood Sally Ann: the dead gods, the statues of the Lares with their horns of plenty; the old faces, the old mantle clocks with their hands stopped, their gears unwound. You stand there longer than intended, holding an old chrome toaster still dusted with a fine sprinkling of breadcrumbs from distant breakfasts, distant mornings.
            
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This first appeared in the author's collection, Earth-cool, and Dirty (Radiant Press.) 

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On the Northern Lights
 
They are like the automated hammers of a playerpiano striking the strings. Like the glisten of sunlight on riverwater.  Foxtracks in the snow. Fingers strumming a flamenco guitar. A slick sheen of water on loon feathers. The fine cracks at the bottom of your teacup.  Like weeds slowly cracking the tarmac. 
 
Children sledding down a snowcovered hillside.  Like the harbor on a misty afternoon. The slime-covered shell of a snapping turtle.  Jackfish cruising the reeds. A game of marbles. They are like the shaggy grass of a neglected yard. The shaggy fur of a neglected dog.  Geese flying in anxious chevrons, pale birds calling and calling across the sky. 
 
Long hair underwater.  Green bottles on the window sill.  Puddles trembling in the downpour.  They are like hailstones ricocheting from rooftops and eavestroughs.  Floorboards scuffed and scarred by countless shoes.  Like fireflies glowing by the barn on a summer night. Grandma waving goodbye at the end of the gravel lane. 
 
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Jacob Lee Bachinger writes from the prairies.  He teaches at University of Lethbridge by day, and (re)writes poetry by night.  His first collection, Earth-cool, and Dirty, is published by Radiant Press (Regina, SK).  His work has been featured in journals like The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and FreeFall, among others.  For more information, please visit: https://www.jacobleebachinger.com/