Hire the twelve year old from next door: Helen of Troy with azure eyes rimmed with black lashes. She loves kids, her mother says. She cuddles the two-year-old, Invites the five-year-old to build puzzles And ram cars against each other.…
Browsing: Poetry
I dream I walk through a desert of stone. It once took months for letters to reach their recipients; packages of supplies to pass foreign customers – worlds gone by. Bananas were posted to prevent scurvy and luck-charms embroidered slowly.…
An afternoon curling around us, not my house nor yours for tea– we sit in a borrowed mansion, the two grantees—one a painter trying to stop nomads from running. the other a writer talking about eyes, how they show what…
In the midst of slicing onions, the poet Receives a message from her Kitchen Witch In almost-iambic-pentameter. Anxiously she searches for paper and pencil Before the elusive language Falls away like the peel. While she scribbles a furious shorthand, A…
Summer already and too hot, time for movement, blowing left or right even, if forward is too much to ask, hips shifting, knees flexed like basketball players, ankle-breakers, fast and then gone, a going somewhere, not just out, but an…
When I come upstate in your third trimester, we take fetch-crazy Otis for a walk; the centimeter gained each week makes you the ball that O runs after. And I feel Ruby cause a quake along the equator of your…
My Face, My Face After so long I couldn’t decide whether it was age making me uglier or thick hair swamping my features so I drove 30 miles once, twice, three times to my hairdresser, but it wasn’t any better…
Oblong in air catapulted into somersault You landed in arms ready to wash the blood from your journey. sniffing me furry without hair My voice no longer an echo. L. B. Williams is the author of the memoir, Letters to…
The message comes toward the end of a long Saint Joan run, my daughter’s final performance in the title role— when we get back late that night the light on our machine flashes like a Broadway Marquee and my brother…
The thin girl burns calories lifting hangers from the shopping rack, hungry as anyone for a bargain. She is not obsessed with her waist or the way her stomach laces her hips together like a rope bridge bent beneath the…