Tyler Dunston

Tyler Dunston is a writer and visual artist from Chattanooga, Tennessee. He holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University and has work featured by Red Wheelbarrow, Cathexis Northwest Press, Public Poetry, and others.

CDG

we wait under streams of diagonal rain
blue cranes and the light of the tower clock

I spot the gash of mustard on my father’s
collar and it’s the last thing I tell him

in the midst of my embarkment and the parting
that makes us strangers to each other

in the clouds a bulb brightens then chokes
over the airport as we say goodbye

to the vertices of cell phone towers
and the wing-walkers on the tarmac

their orange fingers pointing to the sky
the planets turning above like music box dancers

Mare Frigoris

Some mornings I shovel snow
and watch the pigeons vault
from the churchtowers

bewildered by their power
flimsy wings rising
and falling against the gray

the window shutters blink
in amazement at the sudden taking off
of so many birds

scraping against a plane of snow-
marked sky as they angle
toward my garbage bin

they land among the sleet and gravel
and tear at the wet bread rolls
angels from a Hadean earth

hatchlings of a moon so close
their pneumatic bones would glow
like x-rays in its light