Richard Boada

Cannon Bones

Gray Mississippi spring spins each tree. Pollen curls from the wide-trunk oaks. Their yellow
seeds fury along the muscular canopy of big-leaves, a matrix of flapping and levering. At
once, I remember acorns pummeling the tool shed's tin roof. Each metallic spank croaking
like the full-throated and spectacularly hungry frog. In this pasture I fasten the colt's
saddle for my young daughter who would rather ride on the blanket than the brittle leather.
Without knowing, she trusts her ligaments and the colt's to keep them locked and polled.
I'm the hare running too fast, crisscrossing an avenue clogged with car traffic. But they're
the gift, singular anatomies, cannon bones and fetlocks, phalanxes and skulls, orbiting this
coliseum like champions.

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Richard Boada's chapbook Archipelago Sinking (Finishing Line Press 2011) has been nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Third Coast, Southern California Review and Rio Grande Review among others. He teaches writing and environmental communications at Misericordia University.