1.
after Soto
In my dreams,
I lasso poems, feed them apples.
They nicker, nuzzle my hands.
I dip my brush into sap green, Hansa yellow.
My color and line impress O’Keeffe and Matisse.
Van Gogh admires my blues.
Opening a new door in my house,
I find Chinese gardens, jeweled caves.
A palomino mare.
With ease I please my old boss; my
press releases are odes to ceramic tile.
Neruda gives me a thumbs-up.
I sing with Shirley Horn’s smoky sexiness,
Joni Mitchell’s radiance,
Bonnie Raitt’s velvet gut-punch.
I run for miles and miles,
breath light and loose,
knees agile as a gazelle’s.
2.
after Szymborska
In my dreams,
old loves come to me
their eyes full of longing.
I never dream of war.
I have done nothing to deserve this.
Standing at the grocery checkout, years
past my last period, I look down
at my belly, ripe as a melon.
I have learned the demon on my chest
cannot kill me.
I will wake, unscathed, alive.
And what is now forever only a dream:
my heart’s comrade of summer evening
roller coaster rides, rainy-day
drives, talks into dawn
suddenly your wind-chime laughter
finds me.
author of Accidents of Being: Poems from a Philadelphia Neighborhood (Kelsay Books, 2023); Taking the Long Way Home; and La Scaffetta: Poems from the Foundling Drawer; is delighted to appear again in MacQueen’s Quinterly. Her work also appears in Flash Boulevard, The Ekphrastic Review, Clackamas Review, Indiana Review, Orca, Philadelphia Stories, Panoply, and elsewhere. A “graduated” educator, she paints, hikes, and works with several nonprofits in central Pennsylvania.
