Tag: letter poem

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

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Ablation

They wheeled me in while a nurse said she liked my stripy socks. That was the last clean sentence I heard. Before, the doctor said Cooked and Cure and Pilot. The room was sharp and silent. I woke up three times. I was machine. I was equation. My mouth was sticky when I tried to say Stop and groaned. They kicked me back under. The tech said Get it yet? The doc said No. He said it wouldn’t hurt, but I was all alien and probe. A spaceship built wrong. Earth fell. A strange drum played on. I was mutation, stretched from muzzle to toe. I came to in a bright room. The doctor said Close and AV node. A puppeteer strung my EKG. I slept and woke and tried to get up. My heart auditioned beats. The nurse caught me. She held me like a doll, soft at the seams. My voice box dropped and rolled along the floor.

*

Letter from the Barber Shop

It’s when my barber says she almost tore through
her hand with a chainsaw that I think about death—
how it might come blundering like blindfolded men groping

different parts of an elephant, declaring This is it! No, this is it!,
or knowingly like when the Florida cop caught me going
twenty over, saying Do you know how fast that was?

and my thinking, Yes—it was by design. Why do I take great pleasure
in cracking sometimes? Is it control I mistake for freedom,
like a dog baring its teeth, still leashed? Yes, there’s a thrill

in the not-quite, in the almost. Even now, I replay my barber’s laugh—
how casually she said blood and root and earth. How surprising
we can be and how wondrous it would be for Christ to actually come,

despite my early atheism, not cloaked in the chaos of trumpet-sound
but silence, the kind that drips through drywall, the hallway light
turned on not to accuse but to awaken. Isn’t interruption

what we fear most? The Where have you been? Your hands
smelling like nicotine and whiskey. Grace not so much a ladder
but a nurse saying, Silly you—now, you won’t do that again, will you?

*

Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

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Perspicere

I’ve come to love the power lines
crisscrossing the alley behind my house.

Birds pause here, between their quests
for food and water, to rest

until returning to nest in palm trees
across the alley, down the block,

across the street, and to places
that, no matter how I fix my gaze,

I can’t quite know, I can’t quite find.

*

Dear Laurie,

To identify the bird singing from the powerlines,
I pull Birds of America from its spot atop the bookshelf.
Remember, friend, when you gave this book to me? Before
your move to Texas? Or, was it after the returning
to California? Your grandmother’s book
you said, who also loved to name the birds.

How I grieved when you moved half-way across
the country with your family, for your husband’s
better job. I boarded the plane with the baby,
barely three-months old, while you wrangled
the other children up the ramp.
It was December. Remember how we cried?

The new year began and with it, grief began in earnest.
Jobs soured. Friends divorced. In May, my father died.
When school was out, to staunch my tears,
Larry loaded our boys into the car (which car? I don’t remember)
and we crossed the desert states.
Craters, canyons, caverns, kitsch motels, the kids counting
dead critters on the highway all the way to Texas.

Hellish hot, the Texas summer, but Laurie,
you and I were glad to sit in misery together.
We passed the baby back and forth, refilled our icy drinks.
The children, keeping cool, wielded water guns and hoses.
The husbands talked sports, flipped burgers on the grill. It was June.
Did we celebrate our birthdays, one day apart, together?

I don’t remember the birds in Texas, but mosquitos and chiggers
ruled the grass. Cicadas swarmed the backyard trees,
a visitation we’d not expected with its symphony of sizzle
and buzz as if a world were ending or beginning.
We could not have guessed which guests
would call upon us next. Some callers it’s best not to expect.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. Her new collection, Threnody, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com