for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet
There is no new weather here /so close to the well of being
wasp in the lampstand tick in the beard /moon visible day and night
but I’m grateful for azaleas /coming back grateful for muck boots
for folks who fix things/ for hummingbirds’ full feeders
and dead carpenter ants for gardens and hoes and summer
tomatoes above all grateful for /walking the train tracks
with two new pennies/ you and me looking for luck.
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Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.) Chapbooks include They Went to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps, 2016), Chap Book (Platypus Press, 2016), Persephone on the Metro (MadHat press, 2014), The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008), and After Happily Ever After (Two River Chapbooks, 2003.) Her work appears in multiple anthologies.
