My
Cheeks Speak
Why, you’re Wanda Michael’s boy, ain’t you?
I was tall and blond,
with a chest like a draft horse.
She was short, slight and brown haired.
How did this (other) hick know us?
His face pitted and wrinkled
by hot sun, winter wind and age.
On the sidewalk next to the town’s
single traffic light, that blunt farmer
pegged me just right.
While I did not recall him, he saw
my mother’s high cheeks.
She was far away and he likely
had not seen me since I was car-wheel high.
Country folk delight in knowing
their people, in claiming their own.
That country man surely
went through the town schools
with her, decades, children,
marriages and funerals ago.
He remembered her cheeks and
that was enough for him to ID me.
And I am not really a stranger.
We know the same orchards,
corn fields, river and hills.
There’s no reason he shouldn’t
approach me and claim my cheeks.
Cotton Island
Swing slowly low, free and calm.
Sultry Edisto Island,
joy need not be profound.
It pleases the five young’uns
swaying between palmettos
on box springs hooked to two chains,
beside the sand and red dirt
road that runs next to their house,
wooden, barely standing and
on stilts above tide and storm.
The kids do not fear water
nor weather nor those driving
by headed nowhere at all,
but still looking and waving.
They rock their ride and it swings.
There is fun the poor without
appointments enjoy all day.
The cabbage palms provide shade.
Time Out.
Time’s Up.
I welcome being stripped
of pandemic pity.
Communal woe became
shared and imposed argot
we each and all can speak.
We share an empathy
forced down by the devil
always there but unseen.
Those of us not dying
nor with throat or nose tubes
imagine cruel demons
are dispatched and long gone.
Let our Covid terrors end.
Olly olly oxen free
Literary
Magic
Two hundred miles distant and again
twelve hundred miles away, unwitting
poetry players had surely felt themselves
displayed and described clearly in public.
Yes, banal as poets writing about poets
and poetry — or singers singing about
their craft — that trap caught me.
In fairness, it was double baited.
At my reading, my wife’s mobile
played its attention-seeking tones
right after I read a poignant piece
on a long-time friend with dementia.
Visits to her are both sad and funny,
drenched in the rain of confusion.
Ooo, the caller was that same friend,
whom we would call after the reading.
Surely that had to be mere coincidence.
Yet, consider that very evening
my Facebook feed showed a comment
on the promo for the reading, this one
from an erstwhile darling of long ago.
We have not contacted in several years.
She wished me luck, much like Worf’s
Qapla’ exhortation to have success.
She too could not know from the notice
that my reading included a piece on her.
Neither she nor my friend had seen or read
her poem. Neither knew she was on the bill.
Reduced to superstition, I turn country.
I asked myself were their ears burning?
Science does not honour much less adore
telepathy. Right now grant that pretence.
For the nonce, I would trust in the hoodoo
of remote brain-to-brain chatting.
Poets pretend power and they may claim
magical effects for their spoken words.
Michael Ball scrambled from newspapers through business and
technical pubs. Born in OK and raised in rural WV, he became more citified in
Manhattan and Boston. One of the Hyde Park Poets, he has moderate success
placing poems including in Griffel, Elevation Review, Gateway Review, Havik
Anthology, SPLASH!, Peregrine Journal, In Parentheses, Spillwords, It’s All
About Arts, Kind Writers, and Reality Break Press. Featured poet at Menino Arts
Center, Rozzie Reads, and Open Door Yoga Center for the Arts.
I dreamed about you the other night. I was introducing you to someone, you and your brother, apparently a twin, also named Mike. Maybe I'll write a poem about this Gemini occasion.
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