Poetry by Susan K. Reardon

Scott Dexter CC




Taking Inventory


I'm always making a list for you,

tracking the meandering path

of my delights;

searching for yours.


When the goldfinches

you call flying flowers

rise up from behind kudzu-covered

trees along the creek.


The metaphor we made

of the hot pink hibiscus flower

with one ragged petal;

something about the beauty 

of imperfection.


Are there particular flowers that

remind you of your children?

When you laugh uncontrollably, 

which parts

of your body ache?
​
When did your parents love you best?

​



Susan K. Reardon is teacher of neurodiverse preschoolers, a reading tutor, an on again-off again runner, and amateur violinist. A midwesterner by birth and a southerner for the past several decades, her writing has been shaped by living within these two very different cultural and physical climates.  She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Oberlin College and her Master’s degree in Early Childhood Special Education from Georgia State University. She’s spent her career on the front lines of teaching and learning.  At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, she followed an impulse to join a poetry class, and has been working at writing poems ever since. If she had her life to live over, she would be a Speech-Language Pathologist poet who plays jazz piano as a side gig. Her first poetic crushes were e.e. cummings and Emily Dickinson.