Spring 2009 Issue - Poetry Excerpts

Copper Pennies by Sarah Seybold

Sunday afternoons, my mother’s
home-dyed hair. Copper pennies
she rolled at the kitchen table
while humming to classical records
borrowed from the library.

I lay on the couch with my rented cello,
bouncing circles of autumn light
on the ceiling with my glasses,
dreaming of symphonies
I wished I could play.

At school I was teased
for wearing Danielle’s hand-me-downs,
the yellow corduroy concert skirt
my mother got at a yard sale.
I made excuses –
Danielle never really wore the clothes,
they didn’t fit. Our silly dog
knocks the phone off the hook,
that’s why it’s disconnected.
I don’t live in a trailer,
I live in a mobile home.

Excuses – awkward as the line
when poor kids reached the register.
The hard-of-hearing lunch lady
fumbling through the list,
asking them to repeat their names
before checking them off –
Chasity, sent home with lice,
Steve, with man-sized shoes,
Amera, in holey sweatpants.

My fists clenched the change
my mother had gathered,
so I wouldn't have to take free lunch.
End of the month, she had to break
the roll she wrapped

while listening to the cello.
Spread the dirty pennies
on her mattress, recounting.
I wanted copper glow,
rich sheen and rosin scent.
Pennies sparkling on the kitchen table.
Sunday music with my mother.
Sunlight dousing her coin-colored hair.

Different Places to Pray by Susan Rich

Everywhere, everywhere she wrote; something is falling –
a ring of keys slips out of her pocket into the ravine below;

nickels and dimes and to do lists; duck feathers from a gold pillow.
Everywhere someone is losing a favorite sock or a clock stops

circling the day; everywhere she goes she follows the ghost
of her heart; jettisons everything but the shepherd moon, the hopeless cause.

This is the way a life unfolds: decoding messages from profiteroles,
the weight of mature plums in late autumn. She’d prefer a compass

rose, a star chart, text support messages delivered from the net,
even the local pet shop – as long as some god rolls away the gloss

and grime of our gutted days, our global positioning crimes.
Tell me, where do you go to pray – a river valley, a pastry tray?

For a Morning in October by Matthew Burns

The paper says how,
in the folded and unfeeling coat of the mind,
memory sticks like a burr pulled from
the prickly thicket of experience,
and I think how ideal this image is
for such a morning when the neighbors’ baby cries
its long whooping cry at the sound of a dropped pot
and the blue jay shouts from some close maple.
How ideal it is for this hour of the morning
when every sound must be
either gloriously blessed or painful –
that carbine shot of wind-thrown door
and the last bleating ambulance call of the night.
These are the noisy burrs of memory
for a morning in October. Their little hooked hands,
for reasons I’ll never understand, have decided to
hold tight to that heavy woolen coat of the mind,
the one I’ve been sewing together for years
without ever learning one single locking stitch.