Airplanes. As if they are spoon-scraped across the sky—hard going sound. Soft drag of bird feathers.
Back fence. Apple leaves low on the bough. Birds brought to my attention, their unseen fluting and decomposing drainpipe nests.
Calamity of a rainy day in summer if there is no porch. Cookout fumes. Clapboard. Cabbage butterflies.
Dry grass. Shovel. Dirt out of its hole, its separate parts. That down thing again. Don’t go in the door.
Everywhere a footpath. The driveway. Slight incline of the sidewalk going south. The narrow space behind the garage—now with a half-log wedged in.
Finally gentle on geranium leaves and flower petals.
Gravity. Testing at will. Cups, chunky puzzle pieces, crayons. Things drop down. The underinflated basketball rolls to the curb.
Holding a hand. How he mimics a sentence under his breath.
Inspecting garden rows and rain barrels. Stepping into the ivy. Everywhere Ithaca.
Just now.
Kids on skateboards. Kids eating berries from a branch as they walk. Somebody crying down the street.
Last flower pulled from the rhododendron. On the porch floor a cluster of petals and wilts.
More height. Up where the hands are doing.
Neighbors. Their dogs and trucks. Their troubling peekaboo. Why the birds are in their yard. Not yet clover chains, cloud-watching.
Oh, sunhat. Orange juice. Soggy overall bib.
Pageant of strollers and bumble bees. Pointing birds out to strangers. Prickly fur of grass.
Quick flirt of the wing. The tender red of a cardinal like strawberry, watermelon. I can name cardinal, robin, mourning dove. Slender flexible plumage like transparent skin. Up close fresh from the dust bath.
Rocks shuffled away. Railroad song. Red bricks and their in-between. The rake’s teeth bite. The rabbit comes out after bedtime.
Shade placed and removed. Sunlight. Spit. Inside the curtains billow and change. Sparrows. Sway. Someone has been to Dairy Queen.
Truck sounds. Trowel. Things you can pinch or pull, throw over the rail. Things drop down.
Unseen train. Urgencies of things heard, somehow more fearful.
V-space in the fence where a small foot fits.
Water in the pool and its measuring cups. Balls plock on the surface. Poppy petals drop down. Wet foot print on the drive that disappears.
X with your fingernail on the mosquito bite spot.
Yellow flower bending back to earth.
Zap of lightning. Buzz of insects. Ambitious ziggurat of stairs.
Susan Grimm
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. Find her on Facebook, X, and Instagram.