Two
poems from Alison Powell's I Am Your Tin Ship
followed
by a note on the author
Lesson
When
I imagine aging further, I salivate and fidget,
want to strip or argue hard,
fry something, spin.
Each
day my body gains something and loses,
so I do things for the sake of it, am
a woman smiling
at
her enemy at the party. To keep me company,
I search for someone to paint
into my corner-
together
we'd shrink from the passing ambulance,
disbelieving, forgiven as dogs. My
mother,
with
her one way to age, her giving in, glides
through hollow rooms. Her house
a white sure drum,
the
television echoes. She says she dreams of nothing,
calls dreaming voodoo;
between quilt stitches,
her
looks reward me nothing. No one touches her
while she prepares her wholesome
meals,
hummingbirds
circle the impenetrable place,
ignored. When I am old I know the days might
stare
like
sharks, open mouthed, waiting for the glint.
My mother taught me to nap. In
the middle
of
each day, in separate poised ways,
we lie on our beds and wait.
Edema
My father says, They might have to cut it off her. Simple, like bone
and
bone, her finger has fused with that old ring. She sits there,
mindless
as plank wood, cawing in a starched hospice bed.
They'll use a tiny saw to
do it, split the band etched near the knuckle.
Her
slippered feet swell, too. Unpredictable boat-blocks, they hold
inside one
move, nothing swing, nothing called fox, just one blue bee-
line,
dreadful and straight. We take her wrist and crowd the bed
and we encircle
her – ghost of leanness, muscle blown, skin
no
more tissue than wind. This serum is serious and mean.
©
Alison
Powell was born in Indiana and received her MFA from Indiana University. Her poems
have appeared in journals including AGNI, Black Warrior Review,
Caketrain, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and anthologized
in Best New Poets 2006. She has been awarded fellowships from institutions
including the Vermont Studio Center, Writers at Work, The Millay Colony for the
Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. I Am Your Tin Ship has been a semi-finalist
for the Brittingham and Crab Orchard Prizes, and finalist for the Cider Press
Prize and Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She lives in New York City where she
is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at CUNY.
.
"Lesson"
first appeared in AGNI; "Edema" first appeared in Best New Poets
2006.
