Distancing – Week Five
The Neighbor
I have never been in my neighbor’s back garden. I find the gate in the alley
barricaded by recycle bins. A grape-clustered clematis blooms on the fence.
She steps back, allows me to enter after she has moved everything. I take a
chair in the grass. She takes the chair on the patio. I’ve brought my own tea.
A single Cecile Brunner blooms. A variegated osier muscles its way out of a
bed. Compliments are given, complaints are made. Two women on a spring
morning sitting six feet apart hold their worlds together.
A leaf blower blasts
obscenities – we lean closer
to hear ourselves…
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Flip a skirt hem and you have a lip
to cradle tomatoes or questions
or a bit of weather, make-do wings
for the wrangling of life’s loose change,
which is to say I lied
about calling a truce. Enough with locks
and keys. We each need more pockets
to hide those broken parts
of ourselves to be shared only
under a moonless sky. What I bared
and what I bore were twice the dare
I could afford. With you my knees
were forever hinged in remorse
and ecstasy. Water flows down
the easiest path. Icarus
could have fashioned himself a raft,
but who lunges for the sun dreaming
of caution? You could call me
abandoned or merely shipwrecked
on a fickle shore. Here I am
gilding my store of feathers, courting
lost oarsmen and begging
for a storm.…
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You disappeared quicker than I could watch.
Who would have thought gravity faster than
light, fire from the stars we know already
two hundred and fifty years behind, not
able to compete with the satellites
passing above the place where we lay on
the equatorial line, staring at the heavens.
All through the night they traced our
sleeping as if following a magnet,
orbits slowly degrading, a limited
number of concentric circles, while they
signaled, mapped, tracked, escaping atmosphere
to briefly return, disintegrating.
– Sandra Kolankiewicz
Author’s Note: This poem is about a disintegrating romantic relationship. We went to Chang Mai in 1990 and trekked up near the Burmese border to a village where were to get on a bamboo raft and paddle back towards Chang Mai. …
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Take the water. Touch it at the rim. The
Amazon. The Mississippi. Flowing east and
south until they empty into the same ocean,
becoming the same body. Springs and
trickles, tributaries bringing wisdom, life, and
over time maturing into continental
waterways, spilling over banks that cradled
them like the darling sips they were.
Fertilizing floodplains to feed the hungry
masses. Turning forests into lakes, where
mystic dolphins twist through roots and
murk, offering fertility—the birth of your
imagination, the future to behold. And the
water knows itself until it doesn’t: delta
meaning change. Then, El Niño, heavy, pulls.
Sucks up the humpbacks’ sighs, and the rivers
once again are cumulus, raining into tiny
ponds a mountain range away, and you pack
the car with everything you need to make the
drive out west, because that is where you’re
going, and this you know for sure.…
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The cars are meteorites
Streaming forward
They leave streaks in the lane.
I watch, dazed— the colors
They roll slower now—
Through thick silty water
A haze blocking the night above.
Languid, splayed on the riverbed,
Fauna floating round me like
Thin and welcoming hands
Reaching to shield my eyes.
Passersby look onwards,
Fish with their mouths agape.
They inch towards me soundless.
– Cheryl Aguirre…
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from the north/the low clouds float/
single-file/ heading south along
I-75 like a slow army of fluff
it’s late April and snow’s predicted for tonight
i want to be a weatherman in my next life/wrong
or right/you keep your job and there’s no recourse
when i look up/the sky slowly moves over me
and i envision the cloud soldiers in those gray transports
smoking a cigarette/drinking a glass of rainwater/
chewing on hail chips/joking around/saying prayers/pleas
to a silent god to let them live another day
isn’t that what we all want/?/another chance
to get it right or at least not screw it up so much
this time/i won’t turn my back
and walk away without a glance
this time/i’ll tell you exactly how i feel//
i’ll run into your arms and lift
you in the air/swing your legs around/
both of us laughing and kissing and collapsing
in the field
this time/i’ll realize everything///in some strange way///
is a gift
– David James
Author’s Note: The older I get, the more I want a second chance in life—to go back, knowing what I know now, and have a re-do.…
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Perhaps I am not who I think–
the one who would wish
to disappear before your eyes.
What I want is the power
to stretch time,
cheat death,
be always beside you,
throw wide the doors
and walk through.
But then, there is the task of planting lilacs
and I recall my 6 year old self
hidden in the stand of sweetness
perched on the metal lid:
LEVITTOWN – the septic tank.
Oblivious and still.
Nine years flying coast to coast,
five hours in limbo each time,
the calm as I settled in my seat,
cabin door closed.
a portal to no time,
the clock turning back:
a book, a pen, a glass.
Teleportation would have stolen
the time beside my mother
as she drove me to countless dance classes
after working two jobs and cooking dinner–
and what of our penniless honeymoon,
driving ourselves across plains into mountains–
silence, music, our own private humor.…
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