After walking a few yards
you breathe like someone
who has slipped across the border.
I am ahead, you are far
behind. There are no rest stops
on this rocky path to the summit,
no hedgerows to distract
our lack of common interests
or silences broken up with ums
and ers. You wear a jacket
of rain and I nudge you ahead with tuts.
At the top, there is nothing
but what a view. We are at opposite
ends of the plateau with only similar
rocks bringing us closer.
– Christian Ward…
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I flee city, virus, loss,
spin, re-compass, choose west.
Forest, stream, sinuous, deep,
I camp, rig rod, fish. Cast Gray Ghosts
to the far side, expect no strike.
I begin to breathe, hope
hope revives. Presume zip, nada, zilch,
live frugally, on surprise.
I daydream I die, come back not old,
not spent, eager to learn to fish again.
The sun weighs down, light dives maroon
from gold. Dusk swallows tamarack,
aspen, cedar, pine. Riffles gone to eddies
swirl to black. I trace path back
to tent, the remains of fire,
accept dark coals, revel in the ebb.
– Timothy Pilgrim…
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A wax egg and water
Morning cupola,
I clay.
Shape of a sprout,
My bright canvas
Is a stream, a still.
I am non-tongued, but inner.
I am learning how to breathe as water.
– Anna Smetanenko…
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the etymology of the word illness,
or ill, traces back to the old Norse
word for evil. during her treatment
for cancer, my mother had fevered
dreams of stabbing, of murdering really,
her own waste after they removed
her necrotic colon and fixed a bag
to her hip. a hospital therapist
questioned her and deemed the dreams
suicidal ideation. they strapped her arms
to the bedframe for the remainder of the day.
beauty is that which returns us
to innocence. i admire too much that
which, like a poem, risks its own obscurity.
i drank to avoid dreams and escape the unreal.
which one is ill, and therefore evil,
the affliction or the afflicted? someone
once told me that the eyes, in the dark,
with the eyelids closed, still make
every effort to see.…
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All day long my phone has been ringing.
Like an insect rubbing its legs together
to sing. Calls coming in from area codes
I don’t recognize. No one there when I answer.
All day long it has been ringing.
Like a bird who only remembers one song.
I miss the days when it could be quieted
by gently placing it back in its cradle
instead of having to stab at it with my finger
over and over again. No one there when I answer.
It didn’t used to be like this. I used to sleep
through the night. Not now. Now I wake up
every two hours thinking I hear my mother
thumping her cane on the floor after a fall,
and when I open my eyes I never recognize
the room I’m in.…
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……………………..The garden abandoned, soil hardened
…………..to brick, the seasons of my mother’s hearted cabbage
blown by full and quick as a song.
……………………..Once she fed me, and once I was young
…………..enough to be fed. My bowl now waits
blank as a page, porcelain made of bone ash
……………………..and brittle teeth. Here memory I pull along,
…………..red slatted wagon I can’t cut loose.
But where else is there to look? Bodies gone
……………………..cold, my hands even colder, the cursive
…………..of her hair on the pillow a fortune
I can’t decipher. Some people glide toward their fates
……………………..like a bride through a bloomed trellis.
I press my lips to their trains.
– Sandra Yee…
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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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