Two Poems by Marjorie Power

Triad in Celebration of the USPS, 4/8/22

                    at last no longer
shall the Post Office be pushed
     towards a black hole

                    we’ve broken the grip
on our source of splendid stamps
     each a small icon

                    I’ve sealed another
thick epistle to Brigitte
     what’s handwritten breathes

Waiting at Highway’s Edge

How I came to wait,
with hope, is a tale that blows
in the wind behind me,
in a city far behind me.

That city and I would not recognize
each other. The place has grown
its image, become a dress code.
The trees are being memorialized
in an elegant green collage
to hang on a bank wall.
And I have changed too.

You could say I’m a pebble,
granite with a bit of mica, flung
to highway’s edge, mica side up.

I catch light, here between
dwelling places, each with its name.
Some shelter a few old friends.
Holiday greetings will soon take
to the air between us.

Though I’m welcome to go visit
those long-timers, they reveal
scant interest in where I abide.
(Why journey to see someone
who’s become a fleck.)

Though I miss them, I keep
to where I catch and offer back the light.

Marjorie Power’s newest full-length collection, Sufficient Emptiness, was recently published by Deerbrook Editions. A chapbook, Refuses to Suffocate, appeared in 2019 from Blue Lyra Press. Publications which have taken her work recently include Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, Mudfish, Show Us Your Papers (anth.), and Artemis Journal. She and her husband live near family in Rochester, New York, after many years in various Western states.

Image: Ireland Rose | Unsplash