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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.

Something broke the spell. It was either a student’s question or an answer to one already suspended in air. It prompted our professor, a tall white man with the kindest voice and bluest eyes, to start talking about Vietnam. He gripped the sides of his chair, his words trembled, and his sobs, loud and full of sorrow filled up what had been until then just another regular classroom of my life.

At drift log #38 you had jogged 457 strides. That’s an average of about 12 strides per log, which you recall was a low stride/log ratio. It must have been a stormy winter to deposit all those logs, you surmised. At log #78 you noticed a group of seagulls flocking around what would be log #83. At log #80, log #83 looked less like a log. At log #82, log #83 looked more like a body. At stride 975 you confirmed log #83 was a human corpse.

I pick all the raspberries. A ritual now, I fill the bowl. I waste a few while pulling, wait for their stains on my hands. This is unguided presence and meditation, a keeping myself, on my knees in the bush reaching for the ripe and grown. I’m getting the metaphor out early —- the hanging …

I write the word on ice-fogged glass not yet shattered by night

raids. This is routine, one man removed and cuffed and bashed about his head.

Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1561.
I’m smiling right out of my face;

whether it’s the sunset or the hummingbirds,
I can’t be sure. I’m exhausted by springtime