Three Poems by Adrian Koesters

Stricker 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.