Three Poems by William Palmer

Portal

I hear my phone ding.

There is a photo of the baby
swaddled, a pink wool hat,
her skin ruddy and scraped

as though she’s come through
a portal in the cosmos,
eyes closed, delicate nose, lips—

a sob shoots from me like a star.
I had been praying
for days.

Later, getting a haircut,
I tell Kristy
my granddaughter was born

that morning
and when I heard,
a sob burst from me.

Oh yes, she says.

At the counter
I give her twenty-five.
Just twenty, today, she says.

*

Rhonda Posts Our Photo on Facebook

At the end of her visit
Rhonda, my former student, asks me
to hold her new book of poems
as she takes a photo of us on her phone

and in that moment
I don’t have time
to think—so my smile opens
wide, my teeth crooked and a little gray

and I don’t care
how I look
holding Rhonda’s book
with her beside me,
the way
I remember feeling
in classes
all those years,
my smile unleashed.

*

Sighing

I sigh a lot.
My doctor calls it frequent involuntary sighing.
But isn’t all sighing involuntarily?

Does anyone say,
“I’m going to sigh now”?
We just sigh.

I kept sighing
after my friend Roseanne
hanged herself,

and I sighed between sobs
on the steps of her church
after a young priest claimed

she would not go to heaven.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, I-70 Review, JAMA, One Art, Rust & Moth, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.