Ana Maria Spagna
This Midday Sated
Like still water in a shallow tarn
I watched limp leaves await
a wild flutter, a little please. I dreamed I sold
my ribs for meat and got a decent price.
I strained to hear solace in crackle and spit,
staccato silence stripped of any workaday breeze
every inquiry stolid and fraught—his student,
her father, your best friend’s mother—a priority box
taped tight and relabeled.
I broke the spine
of a poet’s book wedged too
long on the shelf. I brushed the hairy stem
of this new weed inscribed to you:
a five petal flower, a spiked seed.
I want to nudge time.
I want to toss small stones to break the surface,
dunk them under this
benign or fallow wing.
These ribs so tender and greasy, he said,
and passed a linen napkin,
approving nods all around. As we launched
I told the boatman: Just the same, I’d rather not.
—Submitted on 10/03/2020
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of the prose works Uplake (University of Washington Press, 2018), Reclaimers (University of Washington Press, 2015), Potluck (Oregon State University Press, 2011), Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus (Bison Books, 2010), and Now Go Home (Oregon State University Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Pilgrimage, North Dakota Quarterly, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Spagna lives in a remote town in the North Cascades of Washington State.
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