Hospitality by Sarah McCann

          for the children of Latournelle

The jetsam gathers here, the violence of trash

flippant from a house, waste—not wasted—used to build.

 

Who knows what language to use here. We use here. Off-

key singing off mark, sponging trees stretch for the notes.

 

Arms out, hands out, fingers out. The sun coats us all

as we touch and clap and hold. You put your right foot

 

in, you put your right foot out, you put your right

foot in. Your right foot, stung large by an obese bee,

 

the barb pulled from your foot by a wisp of a priest,

ginger, spilling blessings with his reach. A thought of right

 

to water lost and forgotten like an ebbing.

We go to the well together.

---

Sarah McCann was a Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in The Bennington Review, Acrturus, Mortar Magazine, The South Dakota Review, and Hanging Loose, as well as Thom Tammaro’s anthology, Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost, and an anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices. Her translations from the Modern Greek into English have been recognized by the Fulbright Foundation with a grant and published in Austerity Measures, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, and World Literature Today.  She has also edited Tertium Quid, a collection of poetry by Robert Lax, and a book of her translations of Maria Laina was recently published by World Poetry Books.