by Cecelia Hagen

I slid to the kitchen linoleum—I liked linoleum,
I liked beer and drank can after can
until I reached the nirvana of seven, empties lying
with open eyes around me after I’d teased out
the last warm sips
by tilting to a steep angle
since I was taught not to waste
and every drop might hold a rainbow.

I liked the rotisserie
feeling in my head, the loosened limbs I couldn’t
quite control. That’s what I said, control,
though it came out sounding like contrail

and I thought of jets trailing white streams
against a blue sky, the blue sky
inside me like a secret,
the linoleum smooth and speckled,

a good place to lie down and dream of flying
like the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, what joy
to lift above the sand and sea, to achieve
freedom, even if brief, a soaring freedom.

by Lucy Adkins

How wonderful to lie in bed
early morning late summer,
the windows open, and hear

the sound of the high school band
practicing two miles away—
the sounds fading, then growing loud
again as they perform an about-face
and march in the other direction.

The trumpets stake out their claim,
tubas, clarinets, oboes,
the cadence of drums more rattle
than bang—a small varied army
advancing across the plain.

How beautiful to be young
and to belong, to walk
beside your fellow, lift a flute
to your lips, a trombone,
wrap the great sousaphone
of your life around you
and play something grand.

by Lucy Adkins

I sit in the chair and she smiles,
puts her hands in my hair. What
are we doing, she asks, and I say
a little off the ends. The color
she takes for granted, knowing me,
knowing how I am not ready
yet to relent. She ties the drape
at my back and begins
the comb out. Already she has
worked ten hours this day:
applying setting solution, color,
holding her scissors close
to her fingers. She cuts herself
sometimes. Working too fast, she says,
momentary lapses, and her hands
are raw with hot water,
chemicals, the occasional slice
of a razor. While the color sets,
she rests awhile, pours herself
a drink. I wish she wouldn’t.
Not so much. She stretches her hands
which have tended me for thirty years.
When she was five, she and my other
sister fought, and she packed a
pasteboard suitcase and took off
down the road. I got in my Plymouth
and brought her back. We still
talk about that sometimes.

by Lucy Adkins

When I am working all day indoors
-after David Budbill

running the Swiffer across the floors,
sliding Windex on the glass
of the coffee table, dusting, arranging,
moving this to there, all the things
we people do—as they say—to make
a house a home, I think of Mary Oliver
up before the sun and outside
to see what deer there are to see,
what egrets and heron, what great
horned owl and goldfinch are out
living their lives as they were born
to do; and when I think of the wealth
of my cupboards—three sets of dishes,
plates and cups and saucers,
the cereal bowls and ice cream
bowls, bowls for soup and drinking tea,
I look out to the chickadee
at the birdbath dipping her beak
gently in the water, then tilting her head
back up to swallow, or I think of an ant
rolling a crumb of bread along the ground,
a berry; and I know there is a heron
in me who waits on long stilt legs,
a deer lifting her head to the wind.
I know there is an animal-bird-bee
in me who loves life and tenaciously
clings to it, looks for the goodness
in it, every day.