Those limpid days are sealed to me
her slow gaze, patient, amused. That hem becomes
a stretch of highway at dusk, an overpass by chemical silos, arc lit.
What are my hours worth, anyway, filed alphabetically
or poured out like balm on the streets of Memphis.
I never met a man who could hold
his thing ironically. Afternoons
I blend into the cabbage rose wallpaper.
The fields stretch away in all directions, huge fields,
Shirley Jackson dries her nylons on the corn there.
and no one bothers to ask. The fleets of big rigs,
newly minted, thunder in formation out across the land.
I crouch naked under the overpass, nauseous,
clutching my little handful of beans. A game
I play with my brain on the way to sleep.
Where I thought I was going. We were going.
A gated community now. No more hunting newts
in the tea-colored seepage.
Beth Enson
Beth Enson lives in northern New Mexico, where she fundraises for her local Birth Center, homeschools her 14-year old daughter, teaches co-counseling, and is at work on her second book of poems. Her first, A Bee In The Sheets, was published jointly in 2001 by Painted Leaf Press and Groundwater Press. She has work in The Urban Resistance, Epicentre, UNM Taos’s HOWL, and in upcoming issues of Women’s Review of Books, Mas Tequila Review, Undertow, and Qarttsiluni. She’s passionately attached to her mad, visionary, conflicted community.
http://epicentremagazine.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/beth-enson/
