Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions captured from poems overheard from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. I figure out the title in the morning.
The poem this week was hard to do. This week was Mary Ann Honaker's feature, and I had to do a lot of micromanaging that night without Jason Wright there to help. I couldn't pay full attention to everyone the way I wanted to (apologies for that). I also had been up since 3:45 in the morning making sure my girlfriend and her daughter got to their early flight to visit relatives for a couple of days. I was wondering if I was going to get a text from them to see how the first day went when David Miller started the open mic off talking about fireflies. The poem quickly became about how I imagined their trip. Nearly 100% supposition except for the peaches and cream, which came from a text I got from my girlfriend halfway through the night.
Behold the work of a distracted mind.
Sketches
Somewhere in South Carolina
my girlfriend's daughter counts fireflies
in her great aunt's backyard,
running and stopping as if obeying traffic
in a lightspeed city.
For a while, Heaven has made itself known.
The Great Beast is left behind
at the TSA, who keeps insisting
her purse is an extra carry-on.
Inside, the great aunt's cat
perches atop purse and pouch,
shaking paws at perceived bugs
inside silhouettes.
Later mother and daughter
will swirl one-handed
local black raspberry ice cream,
half-melted, child imitating
the way her aunt sifts for the curves
of a red wine's body.
Tucked in an inside porch
that makes their apartment
look like a YWCA room..
Anywhere 6 hours away by car,
train or jet, anniversaries
by rings of blood, Ferguson
Geronimo, Hope babies.
Come Labor day, school, orientation.
For mother, a generation of hopefuls
for Boston Latin, like her daughter,
who will receive whatever implant
will make her partial to dead languages
paid off with mandatory community work.
She pictures herself as counselor
to aunt's camp-sized back yard,
perhaps a boutique group,
a Facetime friend distress signals from Jersey,
another in a different Boston school
lost to her like mated mice
in adjacent mazes.
Between seasons,
she'll fall in love with a painting,
a gift from her aunt
of the table she sat by,
a bottle with a slightly off-perspective
she'll grow to love as well,
reaching from her mother's bed
while they both do homework,
pretending to balance
a leaning Beaujolais, make room
for evening peaches and cream.
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| No one wanted to be first or early this week. |
Special thanks to David Miller, Martha Boss, Alfred Zuniga, Lee Varon, M!K, James Van Looy and Mary Ann Honaker.
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