Read a Recently Published Poem by Lois Marie Harrod

I am just trotting down the street

minding my busyness—

red stiletto to the shin—

no stopping to say oh, so surly.

*

Or I’m wildebeesting                                                                                

from the Serengeti to Masai Mara

and a crocodile jaws my hock

and I begin limping towards the river bank

when a lion rushes the grass

to gnaw out my heart

*

Or I pick up James Joyce’s Ulysses

filled with your cramped scribbles—

no Rosetta Stone to translate

the glyphs.

*

And this old shopping list—

did you scrawl gouda or gone?

Published Raleigh Review, Fall 2024.

for Lee, 1942-2022

slight slit, hairline crack

in the handmade cup,

the one I used for morning coffee,

that ceramic cup you bought me

young in Provincetown, the one you replaced

when it cracked years later,

sweet man who was mine,

57 years, the one who liked

to tell me things, the one 

who liked to tell me how to do things 

when my way was not 

your way, that too, the one who said 

Now don’t put this new cup in the microwave,

though permission had been granted

by the potter, microwave safe,––

the same no-fault insurance I granted you,

flaw by flaw, into most of my heart, 

who among us is without sin?

And didn't I say, in defiance, I will use this 

cup, I won’t leave it on the shelf 

with those brandy snifters of yours,

the ones you do not want me to use

because I might break them,

and yet how could you not know the clumsiness

that was me, wasn’t I always

the flawed vessel, crack by crack, rift by rift,

a cup that could not hold all you wanted to pour?

Oh, love, the cup is cracked again,

coffee seeping onto the kitchen floor.

published US 1 Worksheets 69, 3.

My mother preferred periods to semicolons.

You can’t stop smoking halfway, she said.

It’s cease or ampersand. When she found 

my buts and run-ons in the attic, she burned 

   them

sentence by sentence in the big oil drum. 

   Lascivious,

she would have said, had she tried such tokes.

Ignited my father’s love letters too, logs 

punctuated long before she smoldered along, 

seems there was a red-haired nurse 

who wouldn’t follow him to Pittsburgh. 

How much does a preacher make? Not 

   enough, 

he sighed. My mother found those epistles

in the back of his drawer, read them pilcrow 

   by pilcrow,

and then they disappeared. You just keep

those periods coming, she told me, dousing 

   my pants.

1st published in Journal of New Jersey Poets

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