Four Poems by Renee Emerson

Ode to Trees Along the Power Line

Line of pine shaved on one side
like a punk-rock princess.
A round gap ice-cream scooped
from the top of a crabapple grown too tall.

Any limbs that laze too close
to wires strung along the road
are crew-cut, a lop-sided buzz.

Haven’t these trees been taught
never to let growth interrupt
the double-stitch of power and danger?

The electric company sends their men,
and they make short work of it.

*

When I Was Still Pregnant

Each first Tuesday
of the month, I loved
to solve the crossword

in the Midriver News,
addressed “to resident,”
all ads, local events,

then the hopscotch grid,
punnish clues, sponsored
by Lou Fusz Ford.

The words dovetailed,
a fitted brickwork.
I couldn’t argue with

the logic of it—sundog,
alcove, Degas—a lead
to a single answer.

*

My Mother’s Clothes

Never fit us, though we tried. Too small,
too long, she always bought
in the Talls. She told us to trash it all
when we went back a weekday for the lot
thrown in a heap at the door or hung
in the attic of what was now dad’s place.

Together we sisters filled black bags like lungs—
shirts, pants, shoes flung in at a runner’s pace.
One last look around, we found the wedding dress
filed between sweaters, a silk specter in the attic,
hand-sewn, buttercream with age, an anchoress.

We set it in the front seat, silent, enigmatic,
asking its tailored questions of whose we were.
Never fit any of us; never gave it back to her.

*

My Lost Boys

I took no pictures
of you, dear soldiers,

lost on the front line
of myself. There was no
knock at the door, grim
smile in a smart uniform,
no medal, no honor.

The hospital bed
was a white shroud. I
lost your faces in a crowd
of hope, coins slipped
down a grate.

Lost the tune to the song
I sang you before a child
can hear a mother’s voice.

Lost each age you never were
like a star burnt out while light
still touches my skin. All

lost the days you never arrived,
the calendar ripped bits
of my heart I fed you, plucked
from my chest, red
feather and beak.

Today, alone,
lost on a country drive, I saw
a home I wished I owned
solitary in a harvested field.

Lost threshold never crossed,
three rooms in a hallway, locked.

*

Renee Emerson is the author of the poetry collections Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing 2014), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press 2016), and Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2023). She is also the author of the chapbook The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants (Belle Point Press), and the middle grade novel Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike (Wintergoose Publishing 2022). She lives in the Midwest with her husband and children.