Samantha Reynolds
Second DayWe talked about it
all summer and we walked by the daycare often slowing down to show you the slide and the apple tree we made our voices all bouncy and told you how fun it would be and then at night we read the books about llamas and raccoons going to school for the first time and how they cry sometimes but then the mamas always come back we let you pick out new boots and we gave you your brother’s old lunchbox and the morning of your first day we hugged you so long you squirmed out from under us you were quiet but played with the toys as the kids ran around you and when you told me at dinner about your new friend Dominic I added it to the invisible column of things that went well but the next morning when you asked me what car we’d take today and I reminded you that your new daycare is just at the end of our block you looked at me confident and calm but mama I already went and I realized we never mentioned you would go every day so that after all the books and that long hug you must have thought what a peculiar fuss. One step ahead of the quiz
He looks up at me
calmly waiting trusting that if he is patient I will unpack an explanation of life. I expected this steely faith to make me anxious. I would hoard books from the library on igloos galaxies how spider webs hold up against tornadoes why we die. Trying to stay one step ahead of the quiz. But it’s not like that. The little questions are treasures we will hunt down with flashlights and notepads. As for the big questions we will build a fort each time in the living room a quiet wooly womb where we will lay down side by side and imagine out loud if we had answers what they would be. One sense at a time
My sister-in-law’s new baby
curls into her neck pink as fruit her eyes are still closed unfolding one sense at a time I touch her little fist and as she grabs on it occurs to me that if I fell out of someone’s body I’d be ready to grab on too today my son rides his bike for the first time and falls at the playground mouth of gravel and blood I clean him gently with my glove and then he tears off to try the tire swing was it so long ago that he was that new when even putting clothes on his skin felt too rough. The Last Page
The novel sits inside me like an elephant
taking up all the room I obsess about the characters as though they are family depending on me for advice how will they get through this I cry for them the kind of crying that heaves and leaves you sore and then the last page comes as it always does how can I miss people I’ve never known I suppress the urge to track down the author just a few questions weeks later it is all so diluted bits of emotion hang on like plastic bags in trees I feel guilty for moving on and I want to tell them you reminded me how to weep in this way you existed. Connecticut
I picture the parents
mangled by a grief so heavy it is hard to breathe but hearing about it in my car I am the opposite hollowed out by the impossibility of so much anguish I float above the facts desperate to un-know them my son sings his ABCs in French in the backseat I want to sing with him to laugh to call somebody’s God down to undo this but part of me also wants to yell at him wants him to stop painting joy on top of this day of thrashing souls I pull over instead I am late for a meeting but I climb in the backseat my face close to his I try not to cry as he looks at me his hands on my face as wretched images fill me up I whisper no no no and try to focus on the gift of his breath. |
Go to page 2 of Samantha Reynolds' poetry Go to page 3 of Samantha Reynolds' poetry Samantha Reynolds' profile My own self
Every day
you order me to wait on the top floor out of sight while you climb down our steep stairs as you say it with my own self and every day I tell you I can’t how it’s my job to make sure you don’t break like Humpty Dumpty and wine glasses but it isn’t this that convinces you it’s the final part that you make me repeat over and over while we sit together on the top step late for wherever we’re going the part about how much your grandpa and grannies would cry. The art of fending off angry peopleAn angry woman sent
all her rage to me today which turned my limbs into liquid and made me imagine the worst like the girl on the screen that you yell at because didn’t she know it would end this way that girl would be me and my son wouldn’t know me and and I suddenly remember that smiling tricks your cells into believing all is well so I try it I dance in the shower belting out ballads wringing the nerves from my throat I fake it until my feet look familiar and I actually feel like sending some love her way. Love song
He went there to sing
for his wife’s grandmother. The place smelled sour like an old stairwell, scrubbed but the piss lingers. The residents looked waxy and slack, like they had all just woken up. He sang a few oldies to the grandmother and she sang along quietly, a toothless back-up. Then she asked for the same song again, unaware she’d just heard it, and so he played it over and over until her head fell back mouth open in mid-song fast asleep. He would have left tiptoed out guitar in hand but a voice old like tree bark screeched out a command: Hey, good-looking, get back here and sing me a pretty one! Her face was like crumpled tinfoil lipstick seeping into a hundred tiny streams around her pink mouth. Under thin yellow hair patches of scalp revealed as naked as breasts. He pulled up a chair in front of her she smiled winked and wheeled closer. He didn’t play Oh Susanna and Daisy Bell as planned he played one of his own a love song and as he sang to her she wheeled even closer and he leaned in her eyes not blinking he imagined her young and desirable and he sang to that girl staring into her eyes that he later said were as bright as eyes he’d ever seen and when the song was finished she didn’t move and he sang another until her eyes closed not asleep he knew just knowing this moment would soon be a memory and tasting it already. He found out months later that she’d died a few days after his visit. They said they didn’t know she was dead for hours because she just lay there smiling. Counting seconds
The hand on the clock twitches forward
skinny little spider leg counting seconds with devotion assembly line of tiny jewels proof we are still here yet we swat at them like mosquitoes when we are running late or worse we ignore them focusing only when they stack into the heap of a day I remember the first time I read that four babies are born every second I couldn’t take my eyes off the clock so much enormousness squeezed through the eye of each tick tick tick you’d think it would grind the magic of new life into a smear of commonness but if you step inside the fact of it it does the opposite it’s enough to break your heart the insistence of all that hope. The curious urge to implicate myself in a suspicious plot for no reasonI feel my composure blur
like a thick tongue in wine my steady block reason frays like an old sock I am suddenly dressed in an urge to say irreversible things I cannot bear the easiness of it the guards ask their dull questions none of them suspecting that I am biting off the words as they try to chew through my teeth inventions of defiance and fascination at how fate would rush in while I watched aghast at what invisible thing could not be undone.
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Confessions of a thought bandit
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I know people who write in cafés for the distraction as though their thoughts are too shy for eye contact with their own brains. I’m there for the noise too but it’s more crooked than that I’m there to plunder their thoughts. I’ve always done it tuned in to the rivers of images pouring out of strangers peculiar silent stories with no beginning or end. I can’t help it sometimes I even try not to do it to focus on my own poem about pirates but suddenly I’m thinking about Michael J. Fox and how humour makes a man sexy. There’s no reason for me to think about Michael J. Fox which is why I know that girl over there is thinking about him because she watched a Family Ties re-run this morning or she’s writing a paper on Parkinson’s anyways I can’t help it like I said. |
Today the café was packed as usual a tide of ideas leaking into my head onto my page and suddenly jammed right up against Michael J. Fox emerged a bloated sadness as if the roar of the ocean was actually every whale moaning together a harrowing song of grief. I couldn’t be sure if it was him but the old man in the corner had been sitting there a long time his coffee cold by now untouched which made my face pinch in that way it does when you don’t want to cry in public so when he got up to use the washroom I wrote a quick note she was crazy about you I tucked it under his mug and fled. |
