She’s in her own little world,
says one man to the other,
as I walk by their front porch
where they sit and drink beer
with the front door wide open.
Actually, I’m harvesting encounters:
tiger lilies planted by a driveway,
a bursting snowball bush, the curious way
one tree’s branch turned ninety degrees
to grow up and through another limb,
forming a square. The scaly chins
of milkweed pods, how from the right
height the sad, dirty neighborhood
seems clean, just roofs and trees
while sun leaves an orange smudge
as it falls below the mountains.
Sirs, we are much the same.
I see the dark maw
you’ve braved out of, certain
there’s more to life than
what’s on TV. You’ve scoffed
at the dead faces in its greenish glow.
In your hard wooden chairs
you drink the magic draught
that slips you, sometimes,
under the skin of the world,
that becalms jittery qualms
and all the world’s shouting
about what you should be,
should want, so that you may
watch the shorn grass sway
in a tickle of wind and feel
somehow in instead of out.
Humor my restless pacing, sirs,
all the yellow evening, I too
am looking for the door to being.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in MacArthur, West Virginia.
