12/9/2016 1 Comment Three Poems by Adrian KoestersStricker Street Red The bricks are red today. The garage corrugates are still red. The roofs are not red, The tar in the street melts not red. I have nothing to say but red. My mouth is not red. On my pants no trace of red. The cough syrup was red. I drank because it tasted red. I fell asleep on half the couch, red Spit trickle down my cheek red Into sleep, pelvis lifting red, Waking her shocked and red- Eyed speechless face read This one, too: what was red. These days overdone red. On Those Shiny Hot Mornings, We followed him into the fields, he swinging hips and a surveyor’s pencil, his cheerful cry, The text! The text! what we wanted next, to dig into a middened landscape between woody hill and bay. The day the biggest beach boulder showed up split—and it is that way to this minute—he said it was work of fairies, dead Semiahmoo souls emptied in drunken rage or sent off to white schools. Fools! he had it, in nineteen seventy-four, shutting them in law! We took this to be true, for what was worse than shutting up? Lost neither in murder or mandate, our chatter dug it all in their wet spiked grass, the hot fields squared off in string. My Nicky I don’t think I told you how I went back once, after our funeral, rented a car, crossed the bridge, snaked all over the eastern slab of our little slave state, vibrating the way I did when we lay in that motel bed to save the night before the funeral-- I never told you, I knew you wouldn’t feel the same. I said, “Yes, go to Florida,” I said, my accent altered, my tone the tone of the kind of woman who knows the best advice for women who can live in cars. What on earth could have held you? I don’t know, though you went, you tried to make a go of it, still, you never were the same. You’d gone to Mom’s room, her holding pen, the old sheets, the cat—however it looked, you never said, I never got to see before you went mad. That Mom slept in cars before the nuns and priests gathered her up at the end to that apartment, not a mother but alive, the place she wouldn’t let us in after the funeral, did that strike you the same way it did me? No, I need to think you were always in her vein. You stayed, slept with the world, over- dosed, as if you could do again what we’d been so bad at thirty years before. We’re good now, apart from each —each what? Each other, each recollection, each trip I had to take bound to you, each sole unbound one since. Bio: Adrian Koesters is the author of Many Parishes: Poems, published by BrickHouse Books in 2013, and her second book of poems, Three Days with the Long Moon, will appear from BrickHouse in early 2017. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she currently works as Research Editor for the Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
1 Comment
Mary K Stillwell
12/10/2016 08:16:15 pm
Thank you, Adrian.
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