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