Intermittent wet under cloud cover, dry where you are. All day this rain without you—so many planes above the cloud line carrying strangers either closer or farther away from one another while you and I remain grounded. Are we moving anyway towards something finer than what the day might bring or is this an illusion, a stay against everything unforeseen—tiny bottles clinking as the carts make their way down the narrow aisle no matter what class we find ourselves seated in, your voice the captain's voice even if the masks do not inflate and there's no one here to help me put mine on first— my head cradled between your knees.
Copyright © 2014 by Timothy Liu. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on February 19, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
I dig her up and plop her down in a wicker chair.
She’s going to make applesauce and I’m going to get drunk.
She’s cutting worms out of the small green apples from the
backyard
and I’m opening a bottle. It erects like a tower
in the city of my mouth.
The way she makes applesauce, it has ragged
strips of skin and spreads thickly over toast.
It’s famous; eating it is as close to God as I’m going to get,
but I don’t tell her. There’s a dishtowel wrapped around her head
to keep her jaw from falling slack—
Everything hurts.
But I don’t tell her that either. I have to stand at the call box
and see what words I can squeeze in. I’m getting worried.
If I dig her up and put her down in the wicker chair
I’d better be ready for the rest of the family
to make a fuss about it. I’d better bring her back right.
The whole house smells of cinnamon and dust.
We don’t speak. She’s piling up the worms, half-alive
in a silver bowl, she’s throwing them back into the ground
right where her body should be.
Copyright © 2014 by Bianca Stone. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on March 14, 2014.