Author: Sandee Gertz
Dos Gatos Coffee Bar-Johnson City, TN
There are these moments in my life when I feel like I can stop time, but time is a fickle thing
that doesn’t stop for anyone and I realized this the day I got a call from my mom telling me
my grandma had seven days to live but she died in three at three in the morning and I wonder
how three could be a lucky number if it left death in its wake, waking me up in the middle of the night
with nightmares of a frightening, old woman who imitated the gentle, caring nature of my grandma
and I read back now and think that half the things I’ve written are cliche and the other half too sad
so I toss them out to write about a cafe where the cold air isn’t really leaking in, but
leaking out because…
the condensation creeps along the windows so slowly, no one notices, until you look up and see
how the once red glow of the sign across the street has faded to a pink and this color blurs with
the black night, so dark you can barely distinguish the road or the frosted cars that drive along it,
but hot tea with steamed milk wards off the chill that slips in your soul and the well-lit cafe that
you think should be warm, but your tea is no longer steaming and there must be a leak
somewhere that allows winter to seep back in and you wonder, how easily it sneaks into you and
your heart and body and thoughts and you tense, when you realize, that cold has always been
there.
Where I Place my Roots
The palm of my hand reads like a road map
the lines are dirt roads leading up to
a yellow porch dog blinking at neighbors
warding off cicadas, water dripping from
his big dog snout. I followed a crease, past
the wobbly legs of weeping willows,
to Miss Kat’s fudge brownies and
her stories of the men who lived here before us-
her skeleton shakes when she laughs.
I have reached the thumb now
I stop at a circle driveway, the only pool in the neighborhood
undisturbed and vain
like glass, like a mother doing laundry
the vent from the basement breathing out Downy
and bleach. There are tulips in the patio urn
and Japanese maples in the back
a rounded-crown leaf fitting squarely in my hand
turned a fist, folding the map
and protecting history in my pocket.
The Summer of the Baby Birds
My mother saved a nest of baby birds
in early May, the air mild and hushed
when you can see the gray melting
into colors we forgot existed.
She saved them in a shoebox, the
4 or 5 warm pink bellies and worried herself sick.
I heard if we touch a newborn animal,
its mother won’t come back. But I drove with
my own to the 24-hour convenience store for
baby food and watched her careful hands
under a flickering porch light,
how she shivered beneath an indifferent moon.
Every last bird had died
before the first call of the morning chickadee
when the world was still very blue. I think about
those birds now, their weak skin, every inch of it
vulnerable and dependent on my mother.
She’d be the last thing they could count on
and she had to know
what kind of mother wouldn’t come back.
Handlebar Chronicles
I learned to ride a bike so
that I could keep up with the neighborhood kids-
the public-school boys, with their
baseball trading cards and Coca Cola breath
On tires we were equals, weightless
our lungs a cocoon
for magnolias in full bloom
summertime sweat and Coppertone Sport
Mikey’s dad and his Irish Whiskey
my own with a failing heart
becoming white noise
beyond our eternal horizon
the liberation was palpable,
feeling like a helmet bruised knee and
dirt cementing on the skin of my legs.
Our tire patterns looked like braids
and I thought I may never follow them home.
Contemplation On Bleachers in Humboldt Park
I’m learning I’m scared of the things I understand.
Of the things that I cannot: light cutting through
The fence and becoming on dead-aged wood, fractals
of shadows.
When I can dare, I look at what should be
The clay of the diamond, but is the sparkle of albedo.
That is, until the sun shifts its position
And my eyes scroll back to all this meaning again. I know
I’m what’s changing. I know my writing and my life
Do too. When Todd Swindell read aloud:
“These Fears are Real not Paranoid” Harold Norse
Looked wide-eyed at him and began to cry.
Said it was the first time he was hearing his poem.
Was asked how that could be and replied:
“We are unable to see ourselves”. These powerful seconds
Are minutes that were hours that fractured
Days back into weeks that became months into years.
Yet years are months into weeks and into days–
The hours fracture into minutes, minutes into these powerful seconds.
And just now in the 1, I saw all of 0, and was calm.
