Paula J. Lambert
COMING SOON!
Terms of Venery, Revised
by Paula J. Lambert
ISBN: 978-1-962405-44-7
$16.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)
Pre-order discount through OCT 5:
$12.80 ($4.63 US Shipping)
Paula J. Lambert has published four full-length poetry collections including As If This Did Not Happen Every Day (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024) and six chapbooks including Sinkhole (Bottlecap Press 2025). Lambert is also a literary translator, small press publisher, and visual artist. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her mentorship has been recognized by PEN America. A strong supporter of the intersection of poetry and science, she lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.
Hangdog
Baby, I’ve been here before… –Leonard Cohen
The last time I talked to my ex,
I asked him about the dog, and he said,
Didn’t I tell you? The dog, it turned out,
who’d run beside the tractor a thousand times before
one day ran in front of it. I killed her, he said,
and the tone of his voice told me he’d never told anyone
and knew it goddamned well, that he’d buried the dog
and tried to forget what happened.
I hated he’d used me as a way to finally confess:
Bless me, please, for I have sinned, and I’d be damned
if forgiveness was going to come from me—
I was too much like the dog.
She’d come to us
a stray: skinny, groveling, a beagle/blue heeler mix
bearing the marks of training by a too-heavy hand.
We coaxed her and coaxed her and fed her till she finally gave in
and loved us, a healthy, beautiful, happy dog, we thought.
She ran away, and we found her months later
living with somebody else, living with a different name.
She came back to us but was never quite the same:
a hangdog kind of dog who knew she ought to be happy
but wasn’t.
By then I was planning my own escape,
eyeing the tractor, too, and sure that sounds worse than it was
but I mean I wanted to die
because something was in me that wanted to live
a different life. I suffered my own sins for years
till I realized I’d done nothing wrong, leaving him,
till I realized I, too, could run free, run wild, could even make love
like a man, unburdened, unbridled, on top
of the goddamned world, and I enjoyed myself
for a while before settling down again, happy finally. Free.
I mean, what’s loyalty, really—to a woman or a dog,
carefully trained or even carefully loved—
but an accident waiting to happen? I learned
I had something more sacred to offer a man than my body.
I understood, hallelujah, the divine nature
of what I’d once believed profane.
The Church teaches you love is something you save
for just one person. The Church, it seems, forgets how to love
the world. And I don’t know what that dog believed—
I don’t know, even, if she wanted to die, but I do know
sometimes you have to die to one world to learn how to live
in the next. And damn if that dog isn’t the only thing
I’m sorry to have left behind. Damn if that dog didn’t teach me
what it might look like to move on.
This Is Why the Patter of Rain
Red-winged blackbird, wings aflame
and dizzy with joy, asks us to see all that he sees:
sunrise, the intricate patterns of light and shadow
quivering through every bush and every tree
till nightfall—and rain! Slick, tasty,
making mud of the world.
Hear it? Patter, rush,
thunder? Even when it doesn’t rain—dew?
How the air itself swells to visible sparkle?
Don’t get him started on wind: breeze, gale,
the tingling it brings to the body.
How it holds us aloft.
Old crow, charred, grunts and barks
her affirmation: I’ve been saying this for years,
that light is a miracle, that rain to a parched mouth
is sweet as honey. That darkness is a gift—
every night sky offering a velvet tray of stars
we couldn’t see sparkling in the day,
though they’re there.
And snow, sometimes,
like a trillion stars falling at once, sending
the world into stunned, silent glee.
Old crow knows what the young and trilling
red-winged blackbird thinks he’s just discovered.
Crow’s been singing that song so many years
her voice is raw, reduced to a single, hoarse syllable:
Caw! Red-winged blackbird doesn’t trust crow—
nor should he. Crow watches his nest
too carefully. Old crow, hungry crow—
noisy crow!
She scans the sky for hawk, heron, crane. Scans
the grass for fox, snake, weasel. Knows that hunger
is a kind of beauty—that she’d swallow the snow
and stars if she could, swallow the sun and shadows.
So would hawk, whose belly—soft, brown, speckled—
is fed by the very thing that bloodies his talons.
This is why the patter of rain washing us clean
cries in cracks of thunder, why the sun
sometimes burns. Why the morning dew
gently recalls what seeps from every wound.
The breeze whispers contrition and gales
beg for forgiveness—and the very wings
of a red-winged blackbird pulse with love
while they also flash their warning. Old crow
rides the wind like he does, like hawk does.
She feels herself dizzy with joy, like he does,
hawk does, like the sun and rain and shadow,
the stars and snow, heron, crane, fox, weasel,
and the tingling that hunger brings to the body.
