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EDITORIAL

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LAGNIAPPE

MAST

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Three Poems
by Deborah Woodard



Sanka Mnemonic

Truth’s splintered. No one to ask why. Lorna brought us the beginnings of summer
in a country lane. On the run, the body wobbled. Add then her worry:
Philip roughing it in Mexico, as she learned absence—and then wobbling myself
until suddenly there was vacation—my stepmother reading cellophane-backed
novels throughout it. Sunlight on our pale arms, the debut of hawks,
from which we heard the kreeing, from which we heard the keys of the piano.
Maybe we could have a concert, and me asking what I’d asked: Why did he send you
blank sheets? Her boyfriend knew nothing of Sanka from the restaurant where she
worked. A thrum humming becomes music: the bales of newspaper,
the flimsy suitcases of letters. When you think of something, you can have it.
Back from the post office, Lorna didn’t seem particularly down. Maybe his trip
still hadn’t sunk in. I let that become the hawks’ turret careening.
The problem comes when I try to be fair to Phil. Hadn’t she asked for mail?
Runners of flea powder stay, like sunlight on my father when he paced.
On the cellophane-backed mysteries my stepmother read spread marks—
round like nipples, body hollows. My search to partake brought me
to the lake of steady kreeing. For example, two of them circling, years later.

Straw Hat Mnemonic

We can do something with this female brim, weaving the spot where pain
is the child who focuses on Eve, moves on, and we can’t recognize an anemia.
We diminish each object only to acquit its dry, small amulets, all crossed out.
We shuffle them. No hand to hurt, or lips avoiding ours. Yes, rather than concealing
bloodshed, we should go ahead and burn Eve’s straw hat and rations.
I was not anemic, of course. If Lorna bled sporadically and recycled packets of Sanka,
she never mentioned it. Eve might plait the notes accruing to the blade,
while time spray paints the lamb, whispers something new unto the stress.
Make a full-fledged tune of it: half anxiety, half resolve. I’m back to being ten.
I revere your bags so much I repack them. Night tarries: a precision of leaf, emptiness, leaf.
Eve has drained the summer of tallow to warm winter’s knife. It pares down wheat fields,
dices every season except submission. Eve waits—her face, the green slippers.
A stripped branch begot the writing table, and I was in my twenties when I…
It’s the eloquent pauses remind us of an armada in the making, a merry enough armada
Lorna commandeered. Lorna arrived in time to clarify the zone behind the brim.
Lorna had lost something to l’argent. We’d spent all our paired saltines wanting lilac lilac.

Tissue Mnemonic

Lorna’s carried off like tips from a café counter. And darkness owns the sky today:
its cloudy boa drapes itself over my shoulders. What a wedding
to think of Lorna, of her newly sanctioned pleasure! Maybe there were also packets
spilling Sanka.The astronomer had sent her several folded marbled
verses— but he couldn’t do flute music, for example, lip warm on moistened reed
in a country lane. And our rue had been uprooted—an anemia. Now, her old boyfriends
unroll a lackluster cloth, strangely fetching. Lorna had been able to think of something
at Phil’s. She asked for mail. Caulk the holes with packets of Sanka
the way her tissue paper eyelids caulk the holes that stars leave. There’s a conflagration
of hopes, and Phil’s just a little angry sometimes, thinking of roughing it in Mexico.
My stepmother reads. The chain rattles, put back in place. Rice is thrown down on thatch
when Lorna lies feverish, her eyelids spread out on her like a quilt.
A child drinks from the tin fountain. He walks along runners of flea powder.
Lorna refolds sheets in blue envelopes. When I thought about the sheets, I thought
of sealing nail holes constellating the walls of all this gooeyness stuck to the high rafters
of my past. A nest spun from mud and straw. Now she, too, appeared:
girl of beauty, eyelids worn as the pages of old atlases, fretted like wildflowers.
The problem comes when she is overworked. Like Sanka there for the taking
were Lorna’s flimsy suitcases of letters. For me they were visible emotions I lived to mark,
rampant anemias . The bales of newspaper, Lorna, and all I wanted to do, were left over from the
country. I imagined the heart came swathed in such tissue paper,
and sometimes its wrappers could be peeled back cleanly.
To partake of one gray barn, I drank Sanka and ate Melba toast by lamplight.