Sample Poems by Alison Apotheker
Slim Margin
The match to light the fire
to keep the coffee warm
(this is how it starts)
could find, say, a leaf
so dry this Ozark summer.
And then a twig and then from there
(this is how it starts)
catch the cedar posts, sidle up the beams
and burn the cabin down. Like that.
In town, her throat is flaming.
Her eyes dry.
She takes the truck, makes
the hour’s drive on washboard roads
back to the cabin in the woods.
She ignores the purple thistle.
Ignores the heavy, level flight of a hawk
and the free-for-all of her heart
beating all the same. Ignores the giving springs
coiled in the seat, the dirt road, the layers
and layers of earth beneath her.
She knows. She’s known the whole way there.
The cabin’s fine. Stone cold. Nothing to fear.
(Lock the door when you leave.)
What You Shouldn’t Admit About National Disasters
That beneath grief, disbelief,
the raging
at disaster,
also rises a thing akin
to hearing as a school girl
the radio crow
your fortune:
out the window the white swirl
blankets limbs and lawn—
A snow day.
You won’t admit this
to the friend you find
that day at dawn pacing
the sidewalk outside your house
who couldn’t watch
alone, whose brother-in-law will be one
of the rubble-downed,
that, as you pour him a cup of coffee
and settle back into the couch,
your living room has never felt cozier.
The t.v. glows like luck,
like a little campfire warming your hands
while the bears back up to wonder.
Unscathed, you will find yourself
all week aglow
with a new generosity, giving
other drivers the right-of-way,
waving them on
with a commiserate nod.
There’s nothing now
you need to do, the day’s small
worries suspended, floating
like flecks of ash in the sky.
How Madness Found My Mother
Suppose, careening this night
across the Mojave, bounding
through burroweed and creosote,
these were not mere tumbleweeds.
Say they have gone mad from wind.
They straddle barbed fences
to fall back unhurt and wheel
in endless drills of duck-and-
cover over the desert.
What if she had heard in time
their tremblings, at first as faint
as a dust devil through lace curtains
strained yellow from sunlight,
then louder, more persistent
in their approach, the sound now
a tornado of teacups and tennis shoes,
would she have run to her windows,
flung each high in a flash,
her arms lifted as if in praise
of each open palm and glistening finger,
thrown wide the screened porch door,
the back door, the door leading
to the white garage?
But she does not hear the commotion
and sleeps through their caterwauling,
their game of cutthroat leapfrog
that bears down on her panes
and presses against her doors,
so that come morning,
when she goes to pick up her newspaper,
the door knobs don’t turn
and the windows won’t open
and in the cellar where she hides,
she hears them:
Don’t call the fire department.
Don’t call the bulldozers.
Your house is cast in darkness.
Let your eyes adjust.