JACQUELINE K. POWERS

Just a Game of Checkers

Wind and rain blew the curtains
straight out like a ghost was flapping around
the room, drops spraying
and thunderous booms like cavalry
or doom and when that zap hiss sounded
against the closet door
my little brother sat up right in the line of fire.
Before I could even think
I had pushed him back over on the bed
yelling stay down! as checkers scattered,
collateral damage, his face twisted red
fists crunched up like wobbly rocks ready to fly.
But that downed wire burned a hole in the door
the size of a dime and after all
it was just a friendly game of checkers
and there are too few heroes in most wars
but somehow that always seemed
like the start of things.

That Trick of Light

Each day she dozes in her wheelchair
by the door, a fixture expected,
unseen. She startles, wakes,
tries to rise and walk away
as though propelled by some dream
memory, or perhaps a twitchy neuron
like a phantom limb. She staggers, topples,
legs unwieldy as fallen oaks.
We are both mired in the present tense ––
she preserved like a relic in a time capsule,
a bit of tattered silk and lace, now silent
and mostly still, an unread book. Slipped
from her life like discarded clothes, like
naked implications. Her wasted flesh
like baggy stockings. A small brown mole
crawls up one cheek. I hold her hand,
a bag of baby bones. We wait.
I do not laugh when she drops an olive
into a glass of wine, butter into hot tea,
rubs deodorant on her face. Fragrant,
her garbled words drift like steam
but still her laughter seems real.
She sits all day, unlearning what can only be
the past –– there is no future, tense
or otherwise. Her face in shadow now,
altered light or trick of imagination,
a dull eclipse. Or need. Too soon,
I want to say, but that afterimage.
Eyes like frosted windowpanes.

 

 

Order The Mysteries of Fishing and Flight, a poetry collection by Jacqueline K. Powers here.

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