Poetry by John Riley

                          ​jmettraux CC




Drying
 
I don’t want you to die today, he said. They were eating a meal, alone, sitting in the back of a laundromat. He was nine and it was something he had wanted to say for days. He hadn't been able to form the words. Finally, while they ate their sandwiches and waited for their clothes to dry he blurted it out. They had not been talking when he said it. She touched her mouth with her paper towel. I had no plans to, she said. It’s good. We agree, he said. His mother nodded. Yes, she said, Good for now.

​




Beauty May Be

There had been no way to know she would end up with roots
lighter than the fine ones that do the hard work of drawing
the moisture from the soil and pushing it through
the proud wooden top roots and into the gluttonous tree,
or that she would so love her fine new hair
and not care that the poor paycheck
she earned turning money into food
had disappeared into the pockets of the tall woman
who had bent in an uncomfortable position
to make sure the dye permeated all the way
to the skull bone that separates her from the tall tree.
Of this she is sure, she is no tree,
although sometimes when she sits in the old Nissan
for the last few minutes before her shift
and watches how the few trees left alive
across from the strip mall's partitioned parking lot
make a temporary home for the blackbirds
she is reminded of a future she will never have,
one in which she won't remember sitting with the other old ladies
in the clean day room while the well-dressed attendants make sure
she has all the things she needs to rest and wonder,
to make sure she does not flutter away.

​

John Riley has published poetry and fiction in Smokelong Quarterly, Connotation Press, Fiction Daily, The Molotov Cocktail, Dead Mule, St. Anne's Review, Better Than Starbucks, and numerous other anthologies and journals both online and in print. He lives in Greensboro, NC, where he works in educational publishing.