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{filters} anna moore odell Returns Anne Philips and I raising our hands. The teacher calls. We're answering. Embarrassed sharing her name. One sweater, dirty coat, no lunch box. Just a bag with our name on it. I see the other, today, walking to the store with a bag of empties. Voice Outside above the mountains, mountains. On the windowsill, geraniums flowering. The skin is lost. Open a door and inside is a desk is a door and inside glue yourself. Book When the foreigners came over they, too, were kind and gave big swallows from their bottles. If the conversation was in French, he seemed less awkward but maybe because I didn’t understand. Someone would read out loud and look around to catch someone’s eye but everyone was looking down and nodding. Both nearsighted, we slowly take our glasses off. Single mattress on the floor, wrapped in plastic by the landlord. The sheet slipping, a hip against plastic, sweating and sticking. The clock a red blinking. Later, putting on his robe so the other boarders can’t see. The radiator beating deeply inside itself. The noise of cars. A radio left on one wall over, playing reggae. Request Something desires something outside of itself. Trees Sitting on Gram's lap before going to bed, doors fly open. It is true giants become trees and doors open into giants. How solidly Gram shakes her hair. Giants balance like opening doors, have huge feet. She coughs and I think she is beautiful when she coughs. The Fantasy A strange thing has happened, my daughters and I are all old women. They take short steps with me. Seventy-eight. Eighty. One hundred and two. I am one hundred and two years old. Twenty years, my husband dead. One husband left but barely that: sit up at the table, sit up in his bed. We live together. We get our hair done. Read the TV magazine. Get phone calls. Grandchildren visit. Great-grandchildren. A great-great-grandchild born last October. We eat fish patties and vanilla ice cream. The daughters forget. The mother forgets who's who and time splits: the first time I made love by electric light, a white throated sparrow, my father's walk, the pattern of the ferns swaying under the porch. I remember outgrowing a favorite sweater, such little things. I forget to miss people. My mother dead seventy years. I don't have anybody to ask. Tone And Oh! but the ohs! aren't doing today. The Ahs! and Os! are out. So then, Wow! Barf! Bzzzz! Pow! Cuckoo! Ka-Boing! Glitch! Separation Waking up to the man singing in the shower next door. But everything still sounds far away like when my parents were downstairs laughing and drinking with friends after I was tucked away in bed. Allegory Trapped in, the only exit is through image so pass through the fat lady and the living skeleton and the woman with the enormous head, through the old man always there behind the swollen morning face. But how much farther to the spinning barrel that will spit you out, sick into the crowd, the sidewalk lined with cotton candy you can hear the vendors hawking from inside? Request The hostess doesn't change, she stays to the end. I'm the one with the overnight bag in hand, thanking everyone. Give me a breath and don't be nice about it. I can only believe in a turning toward something else. Please, make the doing be the reason for it. Ana’s solid body I remember from dance class. Another not me. First Explain to me the thingness of a thing. The everything that forms just itself. I mean the happening, the doing. Just the smallest truth: it is not this, it is not this. Dinosaurs' Lament Watch the birds, somehow they got ahead of us. They left the ground, teasing our thick bodies. We taught them everything they know except how to survive. For they, above everything else, survived. They group in air, sweeping up in families they modeled after us. They simply lasted: millions of flocks later. What are we now? Stupid creatures. But once we were united, called long miles to each other, observed the weather. |
