Three Poems by Faith Shearin

Telephone Booths

I shut the door and wept over failed math tests
and wayward boyfriends, told my mother
about bad cafeteria food, nosebleeds, my part
in the school play. At summer camp I found them

between cabins in a forest of old growth pines
and settled myself on a shelf-like seat, held the stiff
silver cord like something umbilical. Phone booths were
liminal spaces, both public and private —

a contradiction I loved. They were the size
of closets, confessionals, coffins. Though
mostly extinct I passed one
this summer in an open field — each pane of glass
reflecting swaying wildflowers — and remembered

the distant disembodied voice of my grandfather
and the way Clark Kent became Superman.

*

My Sister, Age Two

My sister, age two, stands with her back to the camera
dressed in a diaper and our mother’s high heeled shoes.
The image is grainy, low quality — some sort of instant

Polaroid with oversized white borders — but in the dim light
I can make out woven wallpaper, shag carpet and,
inside a wooden console, the fat TV we owned

in 1978 — antennae wrapped in aluminum foil
to improve the stormy reception. She is thin
with a thatch of unruly hair and one hand rests

on her hip, as if she’s already stepping into the wobbly
shoes of adulthood, preparing for the epic battles
with our mother and the year she will spend

at our father’s bedside. This is different from the prints
in which she rests like a doll in the arms of every vanishing
grandparent, different from the portraits in which she stands

beside our brother, a full head
shorter than he is though she is a year and a half older.
It is different even from the snapshots in which she wears

a t-shirt that labels all the bones of her skeleton
or has built herself a winged mosquito
costume for Halloween. She is nearly

naked except for the shoes, and alone,
and already herself in the shadowy frame: unaware
of the camera’s gaze, or too elated to care that she

has been caught stealing beauty from our mother’s closet.

*

My Father’s Cancer was like the Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness monster is a shape shifter:
a serpentine creature, sometimes pink,

sometimes black, her long neck and humps rising
from a misty lake in the Scottish Highlands; she slithers

in vague photos and sonar readings and might be
a swimming elephant from a visiting circus, a wind slick,

or some oversized eel. She may or may not have drowned
men and it is difficult to say

whether she is furry or scaly. Likewise my father’s
skin cancer began in his ear but metastasized —

masquerading as a cyst above his eye — and, in this way,
went undetected by scans until the full malignancy

uncoiled beneath the surface of his face; his cancer
travelled on nerves, eroding bones,

which was like drifting on hidden currents,
and still a late and painful biopsy

proved inconclusive. In Glen Mor, on the shores of River Ness,
which flows into Moray Firth

where deep waters rise and fall
there were unexplained sightings — a wriggling and churning, a large

stubby-legged animal resembling a salamander —
which was like my father seeing double

as his eyelid began to droop. The Loch Ness monster
continues to elude investigators who imagine her as a wooden head

attached to a submarine, or the leg of a hippo stuck
to an umbrella, or a moose

or camel, or as some ancient marine reptile — a dinosaur maybe —
that escaped the cretaceous period though this wasn’t

supposed to be possible.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.