Articles

I’ve known of your existence
from the time I was 4 years old.
You were always told to me
like a scary story, something
from a dark fairy tale.

I, too, sing America
in hospital beds,
wires stuck to my skull
with heavy glue.

When I look in the mirror
I see a girl who’s hurting
but still puts a smile on her face for people.

I have to swallow the time they’re gonna try to give me and more
And if I don’t try to swallow they will force it down my throat.

Politics is remote. I want to reach it, but I can’t see it. I can’t see where it goes on. I do hear of it. And when I do, I hear Greeks talking, saying the same things, saying them more beautifully. Kalon. Beautiful and fair. “Last of all comes the tyrannical man; about whom we have once more to ask, how is he formed out of the democratical? and how does he live, in happiness or in misery?”

The other day, lying in bed, my son asked me, Would you rather be a circle or a line? I looked at him. He held up his hand, made a circle with thumb and first finger. Eeenie. Straight line with the finger. Meenie. Circle. Minie.

I thought about it.

An Interview with Susan J. Erickson

Susan J. Erickson’s debut full-length collection of poems, “Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine”, reflects her view of the world as an unpredictable mix of the serious and humorous. Erickson received a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Minnesota. Susan now lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she helped to establish the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Walk and Contest. Her poems appear in “Crab Creek Review”, “Verse Daily”, “Sliver of Stone”, “The Fourth River”, “The Tishman Review”, and numerous anthologies.

Sunlight, shadows, wind. Strangely, no birds.

Out there, ice caps, cold as knives.

Steam from her mouth, his mouth, none from the boy who lay between them. She cradling the boy’s face but he knowing what.

She knowing what but not able to bear it.

If you ever had your Bach, Beethoven, Bartók or Britten on 33 RPM vinyl or 78 RPM shellac, you will have heard my Great Aunt Tilda—even if you’ve never heard of her.

She appeared on every prestigious classical-music label—Deutsche Grammophon, Archiv Produktion, Philips, RCA Red Label, CBS Masterworks—from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. (She did not, fortunately, live long into the 1980s, by which time, thanks to the digital re-mastering of recordings from the vault, her legacy had been all but obliterated.)

The morning I first saw snow, real real snow, as it rained onto my black coat purchased the night before from Ross-Dress for Less, I stood outside my main door, frozen in place, my fists clenched to the sides in fear.