Poetry

Helen Stetter   Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons that knocked and rocked over rutted mud in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies, today she glides to her birthday party in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels, along a lane of smooth gray carpeting that doesn’t jar one petal of the corsage…

The New Choice Pregnancy Testing Kits are hung along the ramp-up to the register. The woman ahead of me would pass hers with flying colors. She’s huge and sighing, the kids in her cart keep eying my candy. I recognize the cashier—she’s the girl who used to work at the Video Cave that closed. We…

Go tell the President: the wagon trail was lost out there beyond the sinking sun. The sun dance ended in a leaden hail. The brooks have all forgotten how to run. I found a feather but I lost the bird. I sent out fifty scouts and they returned with word that there would never be…

Red houses, white houses, drawing our curtains against the spectacle of each other washing dishes and trimming the dog’s nails. Now and then we exchange news. Life’s gotten harder, easier, nobody this week has tied a noose in the master bedroom, or watched his bed flame on the lawn. Nobody in a black auto pulls…

Pressed between print, haunting gutters, we traded closeness for dialogue and plot, dropped concordantly to sleep not long before dawn, hardbacks propped on our chests like tents on a plain in Cooper. Wingless, piscatorial, we dined on starches and molds, slid into cracks, crevices, bathtubs on occasion. Troubled to escape their slick, enameled palisades, we…

Coming to scrub the fourth corner, chip loose paint off cement stuck with old stones, I wonder who wrote in pencil ace, yummy!—and why? Yesterday, pushing a broom into the struts under the stairs, I clinked on an old bottle of bath oil, labeled in deco style. Thirty years in this house. I’ve touched the…

A Godly life would be the best, If it could be lived, so would Eden, If we had stayed there. Meanwhile we can choose a Godly life. For Eden is still burning, And the air scorches our lungs, Our tongues, our young, and yet, Another Eden remains a possibility. To live for others, To pray…

The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a…

“It seems to be the five stages of yeast, not grief, you like to write about,” my son says, meaning that bread is always rising and falling, being broken and eaten, in my poems. And though he is only half serious, I want to say to him “bread rising in the bowl is like breath…