Poetry By Cynthia Atkins

     Ben Seidelman CC




LOSS

One of these days, one of us is going to be left.

Don’t hedge your bets, my inner biker is camped

in a demolished parking lot. There is no me 

without you anymore.   Who can go home to the coat 

on a hook, arms and shoulders still holding the sag

and shape of your loved one. Absence, unholy 

as a tooth ache. When the margins hold a shadow 

with no form. A cologne. A particular voice.

You feel a thousand bee stings and that’s 

just a cake-walk into hell.  Thin veil of wind,

stumbling into the kitchen for the first sip

of coffee. Indented empty chair. We are orphans, 

we are widows, we are half-filled glasses. 

A hollow so voluminous it could start a fire.  

The unopened mail. Once, wrapped tight around

the hips of a lover, breath and vigor, a slap of cold air.   

It’s the last page of the notebook--

No better time for the wound to find its way home.

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My Mama’s Mama

Swung in trees to write notes
on a branch, carved her name
into the cleft where the bark Y’s into
a myriad of decisions.  She wrote
in the margins between 
           the crumbs and the broom.
While she was pickling cucumbers,
with the juice and the seeds 
           with what remorse takes from us.   
She wrote with a stick, the ink of fudge
from a wooden spoon. Her apron pockets 
gathered into a behemoth of her secrets.
            She spoke into the gefilte fish, 
and prayed with the yeast, as shadows 
folded into the chiaroscuro of night.
I tell you, no one must ever know
that my mama’s mama 
             wrote to hide her wounds. 
Slapped silly for speaking 
out of turn? —She wrote into 
the feces on the diapers, into the bold
stink of life.  My mama’s mama wrote
            to be invisible, to disappear.   
Like that lady at the circus cast 
inside the magician’s black box.
She wrote to travel in time,
             this dinner table where her name 
is scratched into wood, and I serve my family soup 
on a snowy day, her print legible everywhere. 

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Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Anti- Heroin Chic, Barzakh, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College. She is an Interviews Editor for American Micro Reviews and Interviews.  She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist, Phillip Welch and their family.  More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
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