Sarah Henry
Iceland
Iceland is arguably the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy, with the Parliament, the Althingi, established in 930.
—Government Offices of Iceland website
1
The judge and his kids
by four women swim
naked in a public pool.
Bodies bump together.
The pool is awash
with those who call
him “Dad,” “Honey,”
or “Judge.”
He has a following
in the shallow end.
It’s indecent.
Who votes for a flasher?
There ought to be a law.
2
Don’t go to the interior
without a plan.
Let someone know about it.
Fill your tank.
Check the weather forecast.
There are earthquakes.
Volcanoes.
Glaciers.
It’s wild in the interior.
3
On Icelandair
we fly back to America
where we elect
men with fig leaves
and private pools.
The ground hasn’t
buckled
beneath their weight
but we have begun
to feel tremors.
Sarah Henry’s poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Sounding East, and The Hollins Critic, as well as in four anthologies published by Kind of a Hurricane Press. She is retired from the Tribune Review newspaper and lives near Pittsburgh.
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