Tag: travel

Two Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Another Sparrow

Another sparrow
hits glass, flies away
stunned to die
like the husband
of a woman I knew, a pillar
of his community. Left her
with five children
and gambling debts.

After the first few
I call a service
that installs peel and paste
film sheets in patterns
birds can see the way
we see guard rails
or blinking arrows—
row of white dots, dashes
a coded message
on every pane.

They tell me my brain
will adapt and I’ll stop seeing
them. I don’t have that kind
of time or faith
in what I’m told.
So I move the feeders further
from the house, hoping
for fewer dead birds,
feathers in flower beds.

I wonder if the woman
whose husband died
ever stops wondering
where he thought
he was going.

*

You Still Can

A peach pink line cuts through the sky at dusk,
a plane coming in for a sunset landing, so many
humans having been somewhere else. If I were not
already here, I’d want to be home.

I don’t travel anymore. I make excuses:
the cost, my dog, flying, inconvenience, discomfort.
It’s gotten embarrassing, like the clatter
of empty bottles, their skinny necks, residual fumes.

I awake with a spider-legged dread.
I belong in a story they won’t let me forget.
Another gathering of Jews bullet-sprayed.
Ancestral warnings. Shocked not surprised.

Hiding is one way to survive but no way
to live. I stay home, sweep crumbs, feed
the dog, pay bills. I fold sheets, make toast.
A plane? You mean you can go anywhere?

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. A once-upon-a-time social worker, a perennial cellist and semi-retired Rolfer, her poems have been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, Peregrine, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. www.lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Traveling Back by Barbara Sabol

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Traveling Back

On our nightly walks, my dog, Traveler,
will crane toward the occasional passing car,
studying each driver’s face, maybe searching

for his first master, the one who might have
taught him to lean full-bodied into love,
who conditioned in him a fierce loyalty.

Perhaps gone astray chasing a chipmunk
in the park or, slipping past a backyard gate,
he found himself irretrievably lost.

Rescued from the street two counties
and six years removed, my cherished companion
may believe, in the instinctive sensory wash

of canine thinking, that his first master
has all this time been driving everywhere,
still looking for him.

I was the family black sheep, declaring to the one
whose life was given over to my care,
I wish you weren’t my mother, with no thought

of my power to bruise. Knowing only the chafe
of that bond, I left with a one-way bus ticket
in my blue jean pocket. In the last years

of my mother’s life, I worked my way back,
fumbling with the intricacies of that knot,
frayed with time and distance, but still holding.

If one day some driver should stop, push open
the passenger door, call my dog by a name
that pricks up his ears, makes him shiver and whine

with joy, I wonder if I could release his leash,
let him leap into the car, and then with a resolve
hard as love, close the door behind him.

*

Barbara Sabol’s fourth collection, Imagine a Town, was awarded the 2019 Poetry Manuscript Prize from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals; most recently, Evening Street Review, Northern Appalachia Review, The Comstock Review, and Literary Accents, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her awards include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Barbara lives in Akron, OH with her husband and wonder dogs.