Nathan Spoon - Two Poems

Naturally

Green of pine before blue of sky. Then what.

Perhaps something important : what happens next

is for you to decide as the sunlight bombards

the earth and the earth in turn releases infrared

energy that makes my skin feel almost too warm.

I could think about anything I manage to think

about and still the basket of my heart would l lose

precious contents. I could ask am I here or not

here and still inconsequentiality would bloom.

What does it mean to matter. Is this also a thing

for you too to decide. Questions so often feel

like a defense lacking purpose or foundation. You

are here and so am I at least for now. There are

notes of music hanging in the ghostly air of how.

A Horn in the Distance

I am transforming myself into a terror you said

as fog rolled over and between the hills. A small

rabbit hopped sideways to eat a shoot or two

before heading home. I didn't know rabbits had

homes the longish grass said. Of course they

do you said while wiping your hands on your

shirt. You were and are terrible enough to say

such a thing : especially to longish grass also

being rolled over by fog. Especially since it had

to be night first before this morning had hope

of breaking. Why you say such things is a mystery

even as you rest your head against my shoulder

as I write these words. I want to be a terror too

someday I say softly to everyone around us.

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Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (Nine Mile Books, 2025). His poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as several anthologies. He is editor of Queerly