Another Question

What’s poems, you ask, at three, from the backseat,

and my mind catches in its throat. I want to say

so many things. A poem is a bumblebee, is a cold

apple, is you in the dark yard with your makeshift butterfly net

begging the fireflies to Get in, is a black morning

when I wake bereft and bumping against the buoys

of a dream, is my father on his peeling back porch

in the depths of a Connecticut January easing each

limp garment onto his clothesline. The song of my spine,

birthday cake snowy with coconut, a day bending

to kiss the ground. A poem is all the magnolias. A tremoring

thought. Every massive tree. Moon moving over the hill

like a lazy eye. Here in the warm car, how

can I tell you everything? Limp screen. Black yard.

Snow cake. Eye song. At each stoplight I try

and write a word but the greens prompt us on.

And the corners are commas, silver caesurae,

this wet drive through town its own perilous line.

About the Author

Margie Chardiet is a poet and mother of two inquisitive children. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she teaches creative writing to high school students. Her work has appeared in the New Haven Review, Meridian, and The Briar Cliff Review.