Tag: Linda Mills Woolsey

An Afternoon of Hollow Things by Linda Mills Woolsey

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An Afternoon of Hollow Things

Each thing cradles its own emptiness—
the feeder’s plastic cylinder drained
of seed, the tip of a branch shivering
loss as a chickadee takes flight, my heart,
circling your absence. The sky’s an erasure,
dubiously blank, the cup I clasp holds
only a brown film and air. For breath
to fill the lungs, they must be emptied.

Hours stall, empty as acorn cups, thin
as the ordinary need just to be loved.
The hollow of my heartbeat is narrow,
too—or simply shallow, condensation
on a cocktail glass, dust on the last book
we might have read together. My heart’s
not shattered, just empty as the space
between pressed lips, waiting to inhale.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey is a Western Pennsylvania native who has spent most of her life in Appalachia, north and south. She reviews poetry for Plume and Presence and reads submissions for River Heron Review. Her poems have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Wild Roof, The Christian Century, The Windhover, ONE ART and other journals. She lives with her husband and two companionable cats in a rural village in Allegany County, NY.

Maybe in the Space of Dreams by Linda Mills Woolsey

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Maybe in the Space of Dreams

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I dream
a long hallway of closets overflowing. She’s there,
at my shoulder complaining
that Dad has hoarded every suit he ever bought—
if he’d just clean them out, we’d have room
for everything.

I wake to dust everywhere—debris of stars
and forests, faint traces of other bodies, other lives
dull every surface of the real. Wings
pierce my reverie—
crows worry something by the hedge
while some invisible air traffic control keeps
gangs of sparrows and finches
from colliding at the feeder.

Three doves eye me from the power lines.
Evenly spaced at first, two
edge closer together till their folded wings
touch. They have the look of women
who watch me from their deaths, still curious
about my life, Nana and Aunt Mildred,
or Aunt Margie, maybe.
It’s hard to tell.

The dead prefer ambiguity, the space
of dreams. And I always fall short
of clarity—my cluttered days undusted,
unintelligible, filled with
maybe. I can’t shake off
these visitants, can’t escape clouds
of witness who won’t let go of this life,
who worry me with ghosts
of their unfinished obsessions,
with the leftover glances of their love.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey (she/her) lives in rural Western New York. Her work has appeared in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Windhover, Wild Roof Journal, St. Katherine Review, Northern Appalachia Review and other journals.