En Plein Air, Summer
Beyond these muggy river catacombs in afternoon
another mother sinks down in despair:
Spill over, spill over
Now my only son is gone
She howls down phantoms from the sultry air.
On moss-wet stone two little girls are watching;
the vapor chills; heat hovers like a prayer
as something plummets deep into the water—
maybe a heavy bag someone dropped there
or maybe it’s nothing . . .maybe someone’s garbage.
Lynched apparitions jerk on railroad ties.
The cotton clouds rip open like a chest wound.
A plundering current flows, no one asks why
the falls are running black over these millstones.
The whispering girls toss green twigs through the air.
The bridge is echoing truths it holds to be self-evident;
no pedestrian will note; and probably there
will be no need to contact police or county.
The ties, this spacious sky will still be there.
The world will little note, nor long remember
one mother wrestling phantoms in the air.
Celeste Schantz’s poems appear in Stone Canoe, Writers Resist, Mud Season Review, One Throne Magazine and other journals. She was recently a finalist in Fugue Literary Journal’s annual writing contest, and her first essay is forthcoming in their Spring ’19 issue. She has poetry forthcoming in two anthologies, one through AROHO and one on poetry about autism. She has studied with the poet and author Marge Piercy. Schantz works for the public library. She lives with her teenaged son in Upstate New York, where she supports his differently-abled schooling and inclusion programs and champions autism rights. She’s currently writing her first book of poems.
