Maybe you’re numb or indifferent or just tired. Stiff little biscuit with upturned paws. Maybe you have that sick feeling—how you pay out pieces of your own intestine to make things turn out tidy and tight
Coming home through the tunnel of air your car shapes, trailing exhaust and microbial plume. The lake becalmed in this one moment, dense burnished saucer of gold.
I want to say suddenly—how it loomed like an oracle who never tells what we need to know.
Puddle of sparkle and dark runs like unstirred sealing wax. Honey scrim over tears that rise in our throats. Listening sieve. It sounds like harmony. An invasion. It feels like a mirror we could cram inside as a tourniquet. Like a fibrous plumpish fleece of gold.
The train punctuates night like the longest hyphen ever.
Weeks earlier, the parakeet at the outdoor pool. The chain link fence like a dizzy unimpeding cage. Yellow feathers with a tinge of green—you know how chlorine changes the color of things. Hop, flutter, and perch. A troop of children beseech, holding their fingers out.
Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash.
Susan Grimm
Susan Grimm has been published inSugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review,Phoebe, andField.Her chapbookAlmost Homewas published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press publishedLakeErie Blue,a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbookRoughed Up by the Sun’sMothering Tonguewas published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council IndividualArtist Grant. Find her on Facebook, X, and Instagram.