Two Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

Piano Practice

Years before the breakdowns and suicide attempts,
hospitalizations and shock treatments, my best
friend, Sara, and I sat at the piano in her family’s
formal living room. It was a cloudy day and the

house was filled with shadows save for the bright
light from a lamp that arced over the pages of her
music. Her reach across the keys was astounding,
like bridges connecting one note to another as her

adolescent body rocked back and forth to a song
I’d never heard—something classical—nothing
like the Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass tunes
my parents preferred. She claimed to hate piano

practice, but threw herself into it like everything
she did, including marrying a man who murdered
her for her money before she could divorce him.
Poison, the police told her parents who found her

lying on a couch in her new apartment, as if she’d
fallen asleep. Sara worked hard to get well and she
was well, at least long enough to marry and be
miserable with someone besides herself. But when

we were two young girls, bud-breasted and dreamy,
we vowed to be friends forever, pictured daughters
becoming best friends, too—how they would sit
side-by-side like we did, practicing being happy.

*

Simple Math

When we shed our clothes and lie down
together on a Sunday afternoon,
this room holds the silence

of a sanctuary save for our intimate
conversation punctuated by kisses. We
ease into it, our lovemaking,

like putting our feet into a pool before
slipping into the water like seals.
Half playful, half serious, we speak

of this and that as our hands slide
over each other’s bodies which, after
so many years, we could find

in a sea of bodies in the dark. But there
are only two of us in this nest we
have made of our marriage,

though what we do here is being done
right now, all over the world.
People keep reaching for each other

because love is like oxygen, the lack
of it deadlier than all the things that can
kill us. But let’s not speak of death

when talking has led to more touching
and thus, romantically, mathematically—
two will soon turn into one.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.