The candle light glow and laughter
Flow from the bay window at the fronT
Of the little white house on the
Mossy covered college street with
Lawn chairs thrown about
A game of comics to pass the time,
Humming turns to whistling and
We giggle after we all start yelling
‘Ain’t no mountain high enough,’
Feeling as young as we’ll get
In the vibrant normalcy of a Friday night
anything seems possible.
The backyard
of our suburban home
is transformed—
moonlight gilding the grass,
shadows at the fence
obscuring weeds
and dry patches—
and in this in-between space,
I hope I might be, too.
I just heard another shooting has occurred
Immediately I think
My survivor’s heart does not always show
For many reasons others can not know
but as I walk this journey
I have one simple wish
That no one else will join me on the path
and if they find themselves here
I hope they know I will always lend a listening ear
The pain runs deep
The scars do not completely heal.
It’s in community we can move forward.
Living life is a choice .
*After a line in Victoria Chang’s poem, “America,” in Obit
Your last words before you slid into the
otherworld followed me reading “where the dead
become part of the living” in my poem I want to believe you are
some orange jewelweed growing on a felled limb or an
oak dropping acorns to continue the line any image
insisting on life you said you’d be every bird of
the stars the dirt the rivers in the wind
the mountains you said even in the dust and
then I would know you are part of this world when
you are no longer in it I can only write half a poem until they
come the signs I mean let’s comb
the files for rainbows insist that the bees returned to their
hives in our courtyard because you are in my hair
you said you’d be everywhere I don’t cry anymore and our
time together seems a gasp but I feel you in the trees
more than anywhere else I hear the whispers and the rustle.
White oaks and shortleaf pines
throw shade at one another
along the uphill slope.
You and I listen to a yellow-bellied sapsucker
drumming its Morse code echoes
in the wind. Sticky silk collects around us.
You usher an orb weaver to safety
before we break through its home
with sticks. A spring peeper jumps across our path
into the thicket of the Berea College Forest.
“A frog!” I shout in excitement.
You stumble to catch him gently
in your cupped hands, you bring him
closer to my wonder-filled face. Released on damp moss,
he sings his dawn chorus as
we side-step down the path
back home.
