Three Poems
Mollie Swayne
The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card
poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my
The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card
poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my
i impart resonance on the amber zen
in a manifestation of waterford
and drink down the vacuity to expedite
enlightenment:
a numb tongue and thawing cheek and the ringing reaching
On Penguins in Brooklyn
the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she
Equivalence
How heartbreaking to find irises tilting
to full bloom in one direction
as if waiting for someone to come
down their path are one symptom
of light’s partiality. A heart
I WANT TO THANK YOU
for unbottling my aged Mandarin with each 晚安 / for cooking me these sardines / strewn on a
beach of rice, their eyes still intact / I want to thank you / for carrying that
i'm in love with the thousand yard stare
deeply towards the worn fold
of the catcher's glove
I pause from scraping frost
off the car, and watch my gray
emissions wisp away
into the chill. I miss strict
seasons, and knowing
what to wear. Last week, it was 72.
When will summer
Just that instant
when thinking becomes
too much
Drive-in movie theater, Merrillville, Indiana, 1989
Field of Dreams on a screen bigger than every building in Merrillville,
my brother and I eating chocolate sundaes from mini Dairy Queen
Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.
All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost.
Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil
There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.
She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
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