Poetry by Susan Vespoli

                   Jeff Ruane CC


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Why I Go to Al-Anon
               ~for my daughter

The bird was tiny, a sparrow
or rock wren, a brown-gray ball
of flittering feathers smacking
herself from one mesh window
into another on my screen porch
in what I thought was an attempt
to get out. She was stuck,

so, I moved to save her,
opened the door and swooshed
her like an aircraft marshaller 
on the tarmac waving directions: 
this way! this way! but she didn’t 
get it, so I grabbed a broom
and swept the air like I was wind--

created movement to force her
to stop slamming herself against
unopenable windows and finally
she woke up, lifted off walls, 
winged toward daylight, 
toward forest and as she flew
I felt like the bodhisattva of birds,

releasing her, easing suffering
and as she crossed through the portal
into what I viewed as her saved life,
out of the shadows, leaped my dog,
who looks like that Life-Is-Good 
dog on coffee mugs and tee-shirts, 
coming after her with canine-

teeth-wolf-jaws wide open 
and because this is the nature 
of the beast, my dog caught her 
in one swoop, then swallowed, 
and I in my 5-foot-3 body stood 
beneath the 100-foot Ponderosa 
pines and cried.





I Dream of Him Somersaulting Underwater

Spiraling, smiling
young boy as whirligig
swimsuit-clad acrobat
blue backyard pool

I want to bottle him
pre-oxycontin script
playful, athletic kid:
tender tadpole.


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Burning Coal

He was clean, thin, older, wore camouflage
patterned running shoes a size larger
than his feet. Knee length shorts,
a tee-shirt bearing the word DOPE
in caps above a graphic of a diamond 

and his teeth reminded me of press-on nails
and the new wrinkles around his eyes 
and his eyes themselves had become his dad’s
eyes only kinder. And he talked about karma
and had found god on the street

in those he shared water with or bummed 
cigarettes from, who said no one had ever been 
so kind to them. And I said you know I love 
you and think of you every day and he smiled
and nodded his bald head that seemed 

so different from the last time I saw it
and I decided that yes, he looks almost
like Gandhi now and maybe Gandhi’s mother 
carried her son around in her chest
like a burning coal, too.

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Susan Vespoli writes from Arizona. She's had work published in spots such as Rattle, Mom Egg Review, New Verse News, Nailed Magazine, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.
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