Autumn Returns to Martins Ferry, Ohio
Closed for Storm
Coordinates
Correspondences
Dropping Weight
Eating Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
Emergence
Fruit Jar
Hammer Strikes
Kitchen Kisses
Lemon drop
M
Orzech Farms
Rules of Engagement
Rust
Sears and Roebuck
State Office Building, Seventh Floor
The Need to Use Your Teeth
Coordinates
Susan Rich
- for Susan B.
In Jamaica we lied about our lives,
told the men we met that we worked
at a small college—somewhere mid-western.
We expected it might dissuade them
for a minute from their enthusiastic declarations
of love, their offer to gift us drugs
to pack across the border. Perhaps,
underneath our books, we craved the criminal,
the indelible thrum: to exist as international
smugglers—sweet agents of deceit.
We would escape to five-star hideouts,
tap code words that moved kilos
along one unspoken here, to there.
What could go wrong?
Your face is full of innocence, they said
as if we were one woman instead of too
close friends. Two windows marked open
and closed. Dear other self, dear miscreant,
dear Susan—yes, you—our
coordinates well-matched—brilliantine
and sparkling in green boots, green
pockets, green scarves spinning us beyond
the singular—where friends equal more
than the extraordinary. Don’t say
the exact point on the map, say we lived
in a world where longing still
tangled with something tangible—
the trilled whistle and burn of release.
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In Jamaica we lied about our lives,
told the men we met that we worked
at a small college—somewhere mid-western.
We expected it might dissuade them
for a minute from their enthusiastic declarations
of love, their offer to gift us drugs
to pack across the border. Perhaps,
underneath our books, we craved the criminal,
the indelible thrum: to exist as international
smugglers—sweet agents of deceit.
We would escape to five-star hideouts,
tap code words that moved kilos
along one unspoken here, to there.
What could go wrong?
Your face is full of innocence, they said
as if we were one woman instead of too
close friends. Two windows marked open
and closed. Dear other self, dear miscreant,
dear Susan—yes, you—our
coordinates well-matched—brilliantine
and sparkling in green boots, green
pockets, green scarves spinning us beyond
the singular—where friends equal more
than the extraordinary. Don’t say
the exact point on the map, say we lived
in a world where longing still
tangled with something tangible—
the trilled whistle and burn of release.