GRADUATION DAY

Standing at the ironing board
pressing two white shirts,
I cannot tell which is my son’s
and which is my husband’s.

First published in Ariel Anthology 2020

COMMITMENT

During all the years of our marriage
we have recycled: Newspapers,
glass, cans, and compost. Leaves,
twigs, garden matter; mulched,
chopped, dug in, turned over.

How, now, after all these years,
do we imagine that mountain of print,
the deafening clatter of steel and tin
cascading down the decades? Glass
bottles that floated no missives, except
that of our silent, committed recycling?

A pile as big as El Capitan, or Gibraltar?
An open pit mine’s worth of metal,
a glass works’ annual output?
We wonder at our mass, and the mass
of all others, for decades.

Almost fifty years of marriage. Almost
fifty years of recycling. One professed in
a public ceremony; the other a much quieter
solitary confession, a tiny yet momentous
decision, each made in a single instant, taken
one can, one peel, one plastic bag, at a time.

JENGA

   When all is said              and done
the changing     acts of sun    
       windspeed          snow depth
rainfall     erosion and icing
vitality of species 
the vigor of land       will
all depend by chance
on which    climate
       prevails   and the
      stability of the

             Turtle’s back

           upon which we balance.

Appeared online in Silver Birch Press Jan. 28, 2022

Yvette Viets Flaten rises early and loves to be writing as the sun comes up.  She and her husband, Dan, have recently moved to the village of Colfax in Dunn County. Find more of her poetry on her author page at VolumeOne.org.