Tag: Barbara Daniels

The Red Piano by Barbara Daniels

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

The Red Piano

Something rattles the windowpanes,
flings noisy bursts of gold, red, gold.
I can’t tell gunfire from fireworks.

At a bar, my friend Al lived through
armed robbery, no problem he thought.
Sirens veer into my neighborhood,

amping my heartbeat. But what I hear
as emergency is only the township’s Santa
waving from a slow-moving firetruck.

One year Al set off New Year’s explosions
in our backyard. I have old photographs—
a drink in Al’s hand, his wife Jeanne and me

in our fluffy hairdos, the men not gray yet,
not really. The neighbor who bragged
about guns moved away, leaving his son

and a rotating team of girlfriends.
Another neighbor had her dog
on a leash when a car hit and killed it.

In his last year, Al climbed to the roof
to clean gutters. Let’s go to Paris,
he said then. Perhaps if I kneel and press

my ear to a heating vent, I’ll hear
the old red piano, everyone singing,
toasting, the only explosion our laughter.

*

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. She also wrote Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Trash by Barbara Daniels

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Trash

She worked the fields in the only shoes she owned.
Her father considered it wasteful to buy clothes
for children. Now that he’s dead, her mother

buys fruit and pasta, toys for the grandchildren,
strings of lights. Her brother drowned
in the night reservoir. After that death

her father hit the girl with his fists,
made her herd cows down the roadside.
There was always someone to call her trash,

the same girls who slipped off their panties
and lay down for sex in the churchyard,
cold on the tumbled stones. She’s back

at the church she attended for years,
parked in her rental car. The sky glistens
with blue stars. Snow slides down a scrap

of sky. Some stranger, a man in new overalls,
steps from the door of the church, pulls
the door shut. Red mud spatters

the strange man’s shoes. He reaches for keys
glances at her, then looks away. The goal
of her life has been get away, and

she did that. She doesn’t know why she
waits in the cold by the red brick church.
She should drive to tonight’s motel,

be ready to leave in the morning. Snow
finds light from a hidden source and gleams
in it, the moon hooked on bent branches.

*

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Dear Scar by Barbara Daniels

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Dear Scar

You’re effortful proud flesh
the color of galvanized roofing
piled in the basement

by the custodian and left
to rust in foul water.
Remember the lit bed,

wall of lights, quick feet
pounding toward me?
Dear oddity, I praise

your ugliness, your stumpy
hitch and itchy drag. You
were cooked in a crucible,

your stitchery split and discarded.
You’re a map of a coast
that sinks as flood waters rise.

Your itch might be healing.
Or a new warning, shadow
dropped through blazing day,

wind rocking trees and
rivering leaves over asphalt.
I want you to fade to an ink trail,

night coming blue-black,
the great oak a father
extending his wounded arm.

*

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.