Poetry |

“Sonnet” and “Quarantine”

Sonnet

 

We wake. Sing a little song

of panic breakfast. Then check

the weather. Clear the throat and

wait for the latch of rasp or

rattle. Scan the Tuesday street,

naked of children. (A stray

woman, leashed to her beagle,

nervous for privacy or

conversation.) If we are not

at home, we might poison

the air. Yet all day, we long

for her salt smell, his clutch.

Dry secret of an ancient despair:

how we grow raw with untouch.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Quarantine

 

Because I have not forgotten

the ceremony of our nakedness,

 

my hunger that begs the question —

 

Because I woke in the early dark,

thinking I was again a child,

 

duplex wall echoing the neighbors’

 

snore as some reprise of parents,

parents, heavy in their slumber

 

sighing out of sync with each

 

other in an old wooden house

of draft and splinter where

 

we kept close and eyed one

 

another in the theater called

family where acts were made

 

to seem spontaneous, lines

 

unrehearsed, plot cast by

some fate or garage god,

 

some latter-day method

 

director who tied us like

monkeys to a kitchen table

 

or made the eldest drag,

 

for days, a pot of ugly soup,

a broken chair. I woke then,

 

fully — and was forty. Not

 

a child packed in a tight

cigarette box of white fiery

 

carcinogens. I wanted to call,

 

to hear the carnal startle

in your voice, to conjure

 

your unstudied touch

 

along my limbs in a warm

bed-meadow not a hundred

 

odd miles and plague away.

Contributor
Heather Treseler

Heather Treseler’s Parturition (2020) received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize, and her sequence of poems, “The Lucie Odes,” was awared Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize (2019). Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, and PN Review, and her essays appear in Los Angeles review of Books and in six books of criticism. She is an associate professor of English and Presidential Fellow for Art, Education, and Community at Worcester State University and a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.

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