Lois Marie Harrod
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The Museum of Your Former Life
Small, of course, just a room
in a row house off the main drag,
but a place you go from time to time,
maybe to meet an old friend,
someone divorced who wants
to tell you one more time what a goat
the old kid was, and you turn
to a cabinet where behind the display
of old napkins and straws,
you see it, the bird banding ring
your former used to wear on his leg
with his quaint message, she caught me,
but she can’t keep me from flying.
Every Friday night he used to ask,
What are you afraid of? disease?
Sometimes you wonder
if you should have forgiven him.
Too late now and not much furniture left:
name one thing you did in 1997,
by the time you can, it disappears.
What you keep is meager.
In the street, homeless fingers
tie a gray shoestring
around a story of dismissal.
Doesn’t take much
to walk away.
Wire Man
He bent a wire hanger into a woman’s face,
its shadow poked the light, making certain things certain:
there would be no more miscarriages.
So put away the nightgown of that wiry child
who died of leukemia, pass the leather jacket
of the motorcycle lover to the Salvation Army,
didn’t he save you by leaving? Stop saying
loss is what you gained, cease drinking that man
who emptied you, no returns on grief.
And later you try. You sit in your living room
and sip, but here he is again, the gall,
buzzing the bubble between the double windows.
Wrong season, but it doesn’t take Terminix
to explain what happened to your own dear bulge.
He has entered the chink between brick and mortar,
the one you sealed, and nested the autumn in your walls.
Now without thinking, you turn on the heat–
and he stings, tail enameled, black and glistening.
"The Museum of Your Former Life" first published US 1 Worksheets, 2010; "Wire Man" first published in Freshwater, 2010
Bio
Lois Marie Harrod's chapbook Cosmogony just won the Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest, and her book Brief Term, poems about teaching, is forthcoming from Black Buzzard Press. Her chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backward (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 350 of her poems have appeared in online and in print journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Zone3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey and writing workshops in public schools.