Poem of the Week

LIKING YOUR POEM, THE NEIGHBOR *

‘Liked’ conjures

such interesting potentialities, implying

the way a mother will tell her daughter

the yellow and green scribbles

that hang on the white refrigerator

remind her of Pollock’s The Key,

the way a poet tells her apprentice

“The imagery in the first line captures me, but

then the poem kind of lurches down the stairs

and scatters laundry across the floor,”

the way a teen wearing a translucent halter top

hastily scribbles undying love on scratch paper during English

to the gage-eared young man she will fish free from the hall,

or the way the beloved shivers under the lover’s touch

as on a winter evening he strums her nerves producing music

mingled with the percussion of cracking embers.

But the way I liked your poem

is the way a balloon breaks free from a child’s hand

and escapes to places I’ve never been.

* “The Neighbor” is a poem by Kathrine Northrop

WEIGHING THE FUTURE

My father weighed heavy, his years

shortened, what was my mother to do

were he to die that night? Her fears

of his future weighed heavy, her years

alone. He ate beyond his seams, his queer

affair with food, this, his love true,

on mother weighed heavy, the together years

shortened. This is what my mother could do:

from that tense home, alone she moved,

west for mountains, wild, unknown,

considering the end, she learned a new

trade.  From that tense home, she debuted

herself, wage-earning, so that in lieu

of his death, she could a new life hone,

free from husband and tense home, and proved,

she could parade the mountains, wild, alone