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Transitional Phrases
Overcautious with lapsed words,
our fluency crumbles into clumsy timing.
Our pirates tan on the Lido deck.
Our Komodos brush their teeth.
Our swordfish fence air.
Our dodos haunt beaches.
Our bottles drown their rescue notes,
lizards slip tails, birds-of-paradise forgo display.
Only the dormant volcano--aeons gone--remembers
how our society split into these islands.
We pause after each word,
smiling with bad accents.
Our people
are tourists.
*Note: based on Wistlawa Szymborska's "Unexpected Meeting"
On Both Our Houses
We make awkward neighbors. Last year, you pulled
every violet in your perfect rug-pile yard
because you hadn't planted them. You sprayed it
chemically flat and cursed my dandelions.
It made me smile to know you could not stop
every tufted seed from growing roots. I let the wind
garden for me: tansy, bramble, primrose, cane.
In early spring, just when the buds'
tips shade green and the bark warms slightly
to the eye, thaw and thunder pooled
between our lots, ignoring the property line.
The water smelled of ice and oak and quiet.
You worried over mosquitoes: potential encephalitis,
unlikely dengue fever. You watch the news too much--
it makes you nervous.
I wanted robins to dip yellow beaks, shy deer
to materialize from scrub pine edging the lawn,
fat frogs to squat on foliate ovals, guarding
yellow-tipped buds. Twilight martens
could slink their sine-wave backs
for a sip of something green.
I woke on Thursday and you'd leveled the pool with gravel
on both sides, filled it flat as Astroturf
before it could deepen, settle, reflect
on the scudding clouds' race across its surface.
You left me a note with a bill for half the cement.
On my side of the fence, the funnel-nosed skunk
is welcome as indigo buntings. No matter now.
A flat patch of parch marks our boundary.
I found a field mouse with doe-brown eyes,
feet in the air by the stony edge. Run-off
from your lawn must've tainted what water was left.
Lea C. Deschenes lives in Worcester, MA and received her MFA in Poetry from New England College. She was a Jacob Knight Award recipient and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared on-line and in print (Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Henniker Review, Spillway, Snakeskin, etc.) She once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. (February 2008)
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