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From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
Three poems by Susan Grace
Old Man and Girl
- Daybreak, like a peach in August,
- breakfast at the bar, china and silver — doesn’t matter,
- he’d drink Louisiana chicory coffee out of an old
- field boot. Hand-mashed blackberry toast, chewing slowly,
- watching Ana Sofia on the veranda sweeping,
- a fickle breeze lifting her hair, letting it break
- on the shoreline of her shoulders, and her dress, white,
- rectangular, embroidered flowers, pressed to the back
- of her legs, the hem flapping at her calves,
- sweeping and sometimes stopping, sweeping and stopping,
- shifting the broom to one hand, the other floating up to her brow,
- looking at the day, at the cornfield, and he looks too.
- What does she see? he wonders. Strong green rows
- or acres and acres of dead stalks that lay like fallen soldiers?
- And what does she hear? He sees her hear something
- when she raises that hand to her brow, tilts her head.
- The voice of God? Or the wind rattling dead leaves?
- There is a kind of grief in wind-blown leaves,
- in rain after harvest.
Two Words
- In secret weekend negotiations held at La Bastide de Moustiers —
- favorite house in Provence of world-famous,
- 21 Michelin stars chef Alain Ducasse — five CEOs
- of the largest investment banks in America,
- two Federal Reserve Bank presidents,
- a top-tier US Treasury Department official,
- and four Congressmen, both parties, well-entrenched,
- came together to finalize the Plan and left the inn
- only for the occasional stroll through the ten-acre gardens.
- Not only did their whereabouts shock Americans,
- but their near-simultaneous deaths 32,000 feet
- above the Atlantic culminated in a death-penalty verdict
- for the carpenter who — five years unemployed and utterly mad
- when offered the job of mushroom slicer for that clandestine gathering,
- hired by Ducasse himself as a favor to a friend’s
- American cousin — surreptitiously replaced matsutake mushrooms
- with the slow-acting, highly-toxic amanitas.
- From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
- peppered with two words —
- you’re welcome.
Anniversary
- Words swim through shallows while a salmon
- in butcher paper sails through the air, thuds,
- slides across tile, collides with lemon, ginger root, shoots
- them past the knife and wine goblet, past spring peas,
- new potatoes, all the way to the edge — over,
- lost in the shadows cast from the center island,
- lit by the window framing the lake that blackens with the setting sun.
- The tip of her finger — nail painted pink, like labia, areola,
- like salmon — slides into a fold, tears open the wrap, pulls out
- the fish, its glassy eye fixed forever up, trained now
- on the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc meant for the glaze, empty,
- the last poured into the goblet, raised, her own eyes glassy
- peer over the rim, to the thin white gash on the skin
- of the lake cut by a sliver-sharp moon as his hour-ago
- words glide by again, swim deeper still, leave
- ever-widening ripples in their wake.
Susan Grace is an associate editor with the lit-cultural journal Fiction International. She has published in Autre Magazine and is pursuing her MFA in fiction at San Diego State University.
Here's something you might be interested in.
From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
Three poems by Susan Grace
From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
Three poems by Susan Grace
Old Man and Girl
- Daybreak, like a peach in August,
- breakfast at the bar, china and silver — doesn’t matter,
- he’d drink Louisiana chicory coffee out of an old
- field boot. Hand-mashed blackberry toast, chewing slowly,
- watching Ana Sofia on the veranda sweeping,
- a fickle breeze lifting her hair, letting it break
- on the shoreline of her shoulders, and her dress, white,
- rectangular, embroidered flowers, pressed to the back
- of her legs, the hem flapping at her calves,
- sweeping and sometimes stopping, sweeping and stopping,
- shifting the broom to one hand, the other floating up to her brow,
- looking at the day, at the cornfield, and he looks too.
- What does she see? he wonders. Strong green rows
- or acres and acres of dead stalks that lay like fallen soldiers?
- And what does she hear? He sees her hear something
- when she raises that hand to her brow, tilts her head.
- The voice of God? Or the wind rattling dead leaves?
- There is a kind of grief in wind-blown leaves,
- in rain after harvest.
Two Words
- In secret weekend negotiations held at La Bastide de Moustiers —
- favorite house in Provence of world-famous,
- 21 Michelin stars chef Alain Ducasse — five CEOs
- of the largest investment banks in America,
- two Federal Reserve Bank presidents,
- a top-tier US Treasury Department official,
- and four Congressmen, both parties, well-entrenched,
- came together to finalize the Plan and left the inn
- only for the occasional stroll through the ten-acre gardens.
- Not only did their whereabouts shock Americans,
- but their near-simultaneous deaths 32,000 feet
- above the Atlantic culminated in a death-penalty verdict
- for the carpenter who — five years unemployed and utterly mad
- when offered the job of mushroom slicer for that clandestine gathering,
- hired by Ducasse himself as a favor to a friend’s
- American cousin — surreptitiously replaced matsutake mushrooms
- with the slow-acting, highly-toxic amanitas.
- From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
- peppered with two words —
- you’re welcome.
Anniversary
- Words swim through shallows while a salmon
- in butcher paper sails through the air, thuds,
- slides across tile, collides with lemon, ginger root, shoots
- them past the knife and wine goblet, past spring peas,
- new potatoes, all the way to the edge — over,
- lost in the shadows cast from the center island,
- lit by the window framing the lake that blackens with the setting sun.
- The tip of her finger — nail painted pink, like labia, areola,
- like salmon — slides into a fold, tears open the wrap, pulls out
- the fish, its glassy eye fixed forever up, trained now
- on the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc meant for the glaze, empty,
- the last poured into the goblet, raised, her own eyes glassy
- peer over the rim, to the thin white gash on the skin
- of the lake cut by a sliver-sharp moon as his hour-ago
- words glide by again, swim deeper still, leave
- ever-widening ripples in their wake.
Susan Grace is an associate editor with the lit-cultural journal Fiction International. She has published in Autre Magazine and is pursuing her MFA in fiction at San Diego State University.
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