The Bed the Size of a Small Country
Wyndam Garden Philadelphia International Airport Hotel, July 27, 2022
What am I doing here at the edge
of this wide land, sheeting beyond me,
hills like overstuffed pillows
guarding the north border, or is it west?
I am having difficulty with directions
since you left, though once I was the navigator,
and you the driver who sometimes
didn’t seem to know north from drought,
south from sought, but yes, we always found laughter
in the deserts—and I thought you were coming
with me, and now I am having trouble figuring out
just why I am or how I am going
or where to lay my head in these vacant hills.
Seven of them, count, and not one yields.
Sitting here at the edge, I look at myself
in a mirror the size of a small lake,
a small woman huddled in a barren place
though someone said, don’t look in the glass,
you’ll get pregnant. Like Abraham’s Sarah,
I guess, at ninety. Still ten years for that.
Lois Marie Harrod’s Spat was published in May 2021 (Finishing Line Press), and her 17th collection Woman, in February 2020 (Blue Lyra Press). Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. Life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Links to her online work may be found at loismarieharrod.org.
Read or listen to poetry by Lois Marie Harrod previously appearing in Terrain.org: two poems and four poems.
Header photo by Foundry Co, courtesy Pixabay.
