Issue #29.1 Three Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen
After Their Fight
Politeness screams from his bouquet of daffodils, buds that look dead in their brown spathes, stems bound by rubbers bands.
They’ll bloom in a couple days, he says. She leaves them on the counter, continues to perform their ritual of getting over it. She brings him a bowl of stew with white beans and barley, napkin and a spoon.
Too much cayenne gives him a coughing fit. She thinks of the woman who watched her husband die choking exactly this way. She thumps him hard on the back.
Water he says, dabs his eyes.
She hurries to the sink to fill a glass. Too late, he reaches to squeeze her hand.
No, he says, for the flowers.
Lightning, Hail
Last night’s storm split my favorite birch in half, straight through her crotch and left
one leggy bough on the ground, her green buds severed from their source, already thirsting.
Where she stood there is now a void—a swath of blue-white sky and my neighbor’s beat up
red Bronco. Mostly there is a terrible gap, space I didn’t know I didn’t want.
The surviving half of her is, I must imagine, in shock. Lopsided, she looks like she could
collapse. Her splintered insides are raw, exposed. There ought to be blood.
I think about the dangerous boys I gave my body to, wanting to be cool and beautiful, loved. But behind
my back, girls called me a slut. That is some self-respect I’ll never get back. Crews with saws
and pulpers clean and haul. I will mourn my tree, but soon it will be like it never existed.
Ensemble
Clearing out closets, I discovered my bass part for the Trout Quintet, margins full of your penciled markings, a dare to make me laugh. Our eyes met for a blip before the violinist— what was his name?— cued the downbeat for your ecstatic arpeggiated opening, plunging us into the stream.
I heard you live on an island where orcas breach, a ferry required to arrive and depart, You never visited, didn’t want to deal with “America.” It shamed me, my life in a mid-sized city, a walk away from Whole Foods, two movie theaters, a hospital.
Sirens go by through the night. I’ve learned to listen to the slow upward glissando, the downward portamento, repeated with crescendo to triple forte until I have to plug my ears for the climax, cymbals crash, brass at full intensity. The Rachmaninoffs of rescue. I think about the day an ambulance will come wailing my way, about the coda and finale you will never hear.
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Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. Her poems have been published in numerous journals. She loves cold weather, late autumn darkness, deep conversation, tart apples, a clean lap pool, and wrangling a poem in progress. She is grateful to Trampoline for supporting her work.
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