by Judy Kaber

After Sky Through Trees by Lois Dodd


If I declare that the woods hold a door,
that the red earth sprouts stalks, shivers

like a teenage girl, twisted and fallen,
would you ask how we can get

through it, how so young a girl can
feel so much despair, how trees can

slice the air like that, how the sky
becomes plastic, almost silver

instead of blue? If you climb this hill
of disarray, are you drawn to the door,

do you crave it, even if you don’t know
what lies on the other side, even if your face

turns to glass, sharp and echoing?

Sit down. We’ll picnic. Bread.
Wine. All the letters of the alphabet

slopping like soup from our hands.
Was there a house there once? I swear

I see a barn caught aloft in branches,
in a swirl of lines. We’re all headed

for that door. It looks so clean here,
not a rope astray, not a feather dropped.

No pistol. No whip. No wet cloth
bound across the mouth. The trees not

silhouettes of us. Not our story.
Our story lies on the other side of that door.

Maybe we’ll find pain, a gleam of loveliness,
a girl sitting breathless in a room.

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Judy Kaber is the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, and author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, december, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the 2021 Maine Poetry Contest and was a finalist for a 2022 Maine Literary Award. Judy lives and writes in Maine.

by Judy Kaber

It’s the fragrance of peanut shells that draws him in,
the smell of horsewhipped joy in such a crowd.

Maybe I can follow him as he disappears around
the tent flap, maybe I can see his shadowless legs

as he stands outside the center ring, considering
the caged tigers, acrobatic clowns, death-defying

women in spangled costumes who climb footholds
to the high wire. Here’s what he did for me:

he carried me to my bed when I begged him,
lowered me gently to the pillow, or, later,

threw me down like a bag of old clothes
that needed to be washed clean.

His love for me was olive-colored, dirt mixed with tears,
so it’s a surprise to find him beneath the big top,

his hand on a rope that coils to the highest platform,
ready to head for the trapeze, to reel out into space,

all those faces below turned up to him,
the ripe fruit of the living.


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Judy Kaber is currently the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Atlanta Review, december, Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and second place in the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.