Poetry |

“Poem Obscured By Sleep and Fog,” “After the Children Have Grown” & “One Kind of Waiting”

three prose poems by Kathleen McGookey

Poem Obscured By Sleep and Fog

 

The morning stutters a little when my daughter oversleeps. But her socks are clean and she washed her hair the night before. Her brother says, Wear the black windbreaker.  It looks nice.  I slice a pear, wishing for the kindness of minutes that pass like yellow leaves drifting to the ground. Her biology homework is done, diagrams of cell walls drawn in purple ink.  Soon enough, she carries her backpack into the darkness, into the fog, past the field which wants nothing, not even sun on its lovely slim grasses, or wind, or snow.  My heart settles down like a cat curled by the doorstep, who, having survived the wet and starless dark, now waits to be found.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

After the Children Have Grown

I drop fresh ripe peaches into boiling water, then slip the skins off.  A single peach fills both my palms, the skinned halves heavy and slippery as a soapy baby.  It has rained every afternoon for days.  Red-gold juice streaks my arms to the elbows and still two more bushels wait.  Such abundance in the orchard might last a week.  Tonight, only the high, light voices of coyotes will startle us out of sleep, into the open field of the dark.  With luck, we’ll turn to each other to find whatever sweetness remains.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

One Kind of Waiting

Each day the distance cradles us.  I am two hundred miles from that downy woodpecker, little red-capped flash, attacking the suet outside your living room window.  The window painted shut.  The stale air tinged with brandy and cat litter, miles from your hospital room.  Miles from the lake that fills the horizon and the dunes that shift in their sleep, burying the aspen branch by branch.  Those waves of sand smell like baby’s breath, not delicate, not honey sweet.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

For David Nilsen’s conversation with Kathleen McGookey, recently published On The Seawall, click here.

 

Contributor
Kathleen McGookey

Kathleen McGookey’s most recent books are Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). In 2024, two new books are forthcoming:  Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks), and Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared recently in Epoch, Field, Glassworks, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, One, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Sweet, Waterwheel Review, and Willow Springs.

Posted in Poetry

One comment on ““Poem Obscured By Sleep and Fog,” “After the Children Have Grown” & “One Kind of Waiting””

  1. Pingback: Issue 88: Kathleen McGookey - Willow Springs Magazine

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.