Dan Collins

Dan Collins is an artist and poet grateful for the creative community of Dallas, Texas where he also works in the printing industry. His poetry has been published in Blue Mesa Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Boiler, Entropy, [Out of Nothing], Redivider, The New Guard volume VII, Thimble Lit Mag, White Rock Zine Machine, The Blue Moon Observer, and The Writer’s Garret Common Language Project. He is also a contributor to Pandora’s Box, and Co-owner of Tree House Studio.

Landscape

If you want to catch a rabbit,
stand behind a tree and make
noise like a carrot

– Bob Ross

Always, the canvas
pushes back against
the hunter’s empty cabin
abandoned in reckless
pursuit of a moose too
large, too beautiful to ignore.
Its woven thread and fine
white clay surface begs
instead to be soaked in wild
spontaneous meadow: “That’s
where the crows will sit.”

First you must beat the brush
until the world is all canvas
and oil dripping pigment
with happy accident. And you
are completely irrelevant
to the cadmium yellow
wheedling into the blue; too
kind to pry, it suggests
a red undertone to the soft
wet sky: “We don’t want to set
these clouds on fire.”––unlike
the pallet knife that falls to work
hacking out crooked pines, swinging
like an ax on the upstroke, back
to alizarin laced black, a murmur
of starlings, in leaves of autumn
migration to seed the potential
mountain. “See how it fades
into nothing? That’s
what you’re looking for.”

This poem is a cinema of unchanging pictures

(glazed with rain)

After William Carlos Williams
It’s impossible not
to write a poem about a flood
of white chickens, but it never
ends up being about chickens.
Still, the waters recede
in long clouds like furrowed
fields; or rows of braided
train wreck; sometimes
pounding hooves and broken
bridles––the moon to forage there
between calamities of floating
cars and fire ants: Here, a wheel
barrow; there, a wooden horse.