Poet Tree Town

by Leigh Sugar

Ann Arbor, 1999

After sweaty September soccer practice, only a cone from Sweet Memories —
Blue Moon — will do. It’s kind of like bubblegum mixed with
cotton candy. Maybe cotton candy flavored bubblegum? I never
don’t get sprinkles. You need the sprinkles. Anyways, who
else goes to Borders just to look at the CD covers? Vitamin C is so
famous right now for that song about moving on. It’s called

by Cam Finch

You have a river inside you. Your body 60% water. 

Your eyes gaze at me through a lens of water as I speak. 

This is a poem about water and about you. 

* 

We gathered at North Hydro Park, to discuss how to talk to you about water.

by Shayla Card-Nowlin

When we were kids – we played tag across our aunties living room, her words would chase us
“All that movin’, all that playin’, all that jumpin’. You better stop before you break something
in this house”
In this house – it is fine china-cabinet-family antique-snow globes
Is what we are in

by Abigail McFee

In Michigan, the repair man told me the historic 
building I now lived in—maroon with green 
trim, on the corner of Liberty & Division— 

by Georgi Bargamian

It’s hot and tight on Liberty
As our throng shuffles toward Fourth,
Cooperation a silent pact.
We make small talk,
Apologizing now and then for errant contact, impatient pace.

by Russell Brakefield

My friend John has no birthday
most of the time. He doesn’t know
when to celebrate his own life.
Behind the register, at the bookstore,
we sneak news and baseball scores
from ancient computer monitors.

by A.E.

The sergeant on the stand asked if pepper spray is for self defense says it’s for compliance as we watch footage of his boys causing the brain damage your friend will carry with her forever,

And I’m ten inches from a security guard’s holster fighting the urge to do what the judge won’t when you reach for my hand instead.

by Katie Hartsock

Sunrise light that lets the river melt and keep
its freezing, too, I’ve climbed this hill
for you. A squirrel scrabbles to the top
of a thin tree’s leaning, then dives down in.
I’d love to disappear into a tree; maybe

by Ryan McCarty

My students are going to need a picket
of teachers again, so I’m lesson planning
a chant while I’m hanging laundry on the line.
I’m not a luddite but I learned that driers blow
microplastics by the millions and my bare feet

by Julie Zhou

warm mulberries on sidewalks
the concrete stained rich with
flavored faded chalk sketches
from a girl waiting for autumn

by Ares Valdiviezo

Neon rain
smiles down on my face.

Ladder up.
Change the letters—
a new screening,
a new day.

by Alyna Shae Er Lim

One misses the first kiss of blue skies,
where orange needlessly fights to reach the evergreens,
to drench golden, gilded fields
that makes one silent on the bench
shaded in between

by Angelica Esquivel

It is morning, before the sun has fully risen.
I stand before the Huron River, watching
the white mist spiral over the water. A swan
drapes herself into a circle on the bank.

by Anna Kovaleva

There’s a tradition in Ann Arbor to throw shoes onto power lines.
Hundreds hidden under leaves.
Many on display with nothing much around them.
Some even hang so low you could almost reach them.

by Cam Finch

for eric, and the birds

I feel the swifts coming
my bones are flowering with portent
and the clouds are
breathing signals again
it is time for us to count                                                  

by J.H. Riggs

This morning, I made a cake,
With a homemade marmalade from orange trees in Jordan,
And olive oil from the West Bank.

And my thoughts drift to my mother and of home.

by Keith Taylor

for my daughter

The large brown paw-paw seeds
evolved, perhaps, to be carried
in the guts of our megafauna,
our mammoths and mastodons,
our giant sloths, all long gone.

by Harlan, age 8

Climb up in an oak tree
Lie down on a branch
Gather lots of leaves
Cover yourself in them
Here I am
In my sweet little bed

by Pedro Campos

Leave the bag, homeless man,
But don’t lose it.
Orbit it, circle it.
You’ve carried the weight already,
It’s heavy, I know.

by Adriana Alcala

i.
There is something about puncturing the tight and airy bubble of your own sadness
with a bike ride that pumps me like a rubber tire full of melancholy this Sunday evening-
One which I pump over pathetic hills to strange observations: