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Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and Ibbetson Street. Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light … the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.

Anatomy of a Moose

Michael Todd Steffen

The sagging ears have just heard so much.
At the déjà-vu startle again, we are powerless.

Its upper lip has drooped so far
nothing short of acceptance will restore it.

Nothing shy of surrender
has penciled the sadness into its weary brown eyes.

It is front-laden
with moral inventory.

The wind has blown powdery snow
over the personality of these further sets of tracks

much as its groan for a call and musk transmit
the dirty details to its nomadic kind.

The tailored elk: Do the moose ever
change out of their pajamas?

They gray rivers of Vermont would not deny
the principles of the message the moose carry.

— Michael Todd Steffen

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