Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Marianne Szlyk - One Poem

Cabin Fever
 
The green leaves outside glitter as if welded to the tree.
Birds perched there sing harshly, if at all.
 
Clouds are piling up like traffic.
The air tastes like car exhaust.
 
You are hoping for a storm this afternoon,
something, any thing to break this spell.
 
Outside young men in tank tops and baggy shorts
march up and down the street with their children.

Couples bike.  The neighbors drag in their trashcans.
The roofers walk back to work.  You stay in.

You stop the dryer, fearing its heat’s
popping the pocket of cool around you.
 
The wash piles up.  Fearing the air outside,
you hang your clothes over tables and chairs to dry.
 
Now the rooms grow damp with Apple Mango Tango.
You choke. You curse the sheets.  You restart the dryer.
 
A CD of saxophones and shadows plays in your head;
the long, slow notes and rolling drum remind you of thunder,
 
of when the weather seemed more manageable,
when you lived up north and only ice storms kept you in.
 
 
 
Marianne Szlyk recently published her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking Up at Trees of Heaven, at Kind of a Hurricane Press. Her poem "Walking Past Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Winter" has been nominated for the 2014 Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in print and online, most recently in Carcinogenic Poetry, bird's thumb, Of/with, and Walking is Still Honest as well as Kind of a Hurricane's anthologies, most recently Switch (the Difference).  She edits a poetry blog-zine at http://thesongis.blogspot.com/.

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