by Kelly R. Samuels

What are late nights for

but worry? The gravel drive
absent of the one car.

She works at a scarf
for colder seasons.

He said she was a—.
Said he was leaving her to it.

Thoughts of flatter places
with no birches, fields still
not full throated, but soon.

She walks only so far
so as to hear if the baby cries.

The lake is oil.
The mosquitoes, thick, loiter
near the ear. Little tune.

The goldenrod won’t bloom
for another two months.

When this is due.
And that is due.

And she will count out too few
ones, smoothing them
on the table.

In her grandmother’s garden:
delicate peonies.

Later: a different, windswept snow
that covers windows with a different light.

____________________________________________________________

Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two full-length collections—Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press) and All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books)—and four chapbooks: Talking to Alice (Whittle Micro-Press), Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited Press), To Marie Antoinette, from (Dancing Girl Press) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line Press). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, River Styx, Denver Quarterly, and Court Green. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

by Kelly R. Samuels

like teeth. Close up and two dimensional, as they are.
I sit in the chair with my bib. He’s gesturing,

pointing to what I often conceal—never smiling
broadly, or: only when forgetting. Here is the canine,

he says. Like a dog’s, he says. And the molars
with their two-pronged or fused roots.

All is white and gray and a deeper gray, the darkest
parts not even teeth but the sinuses like storm clouds.

I see a child’s toes after a long bath.
Tulips bleached of all color. But more:

of the sea or cave—what is found where
there is little light and delving is necessary.

Farther north, that lake I love and the crystal
ice structures formed in its wet, wind-rocked caves.

Somewhere other, the white sand anemone without
its magenta—so disparaged, so delicate.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, The Pinch, DMQ Review, Salt Hill, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

by Kelly R. Samuels

There is the man who wears a bell

on his knee in that novel. It serves as a telling,

like the buoy near the north shore that rang out

the first night here—a warning to scatter. To give

berth, wide and slow and steady.

He walks in the garden, this man, this character,

this symbol, but there are no gardens here. Here,

instead, there is the unkempt lilac and drying pine

and the wild thimbleberry.

And the lake lunging, noisy and troubling, and then

still, the waves no more than shaken foil.

The small purple wildflower clinging to the stone

where I saw the butterflies—along the south shore, along

the point with the name of a girl you once loved.

The stone, reddish and swirled, bared

and visible below the water. With the hollowed out

bowls for smaller stones of grey.

The stream coppery and bloodied at its mouth.

Bells for me—markers

of something, these. Not a warning to disperse,

as with him.

Nor a god or faith, I don’t know—

something

of confirmation and bliss.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals including The Carolina Quarterly, Sweet Tree Review, Salt Hill, Permafrost, and RHINO. She lives in the upper Midwest and has two chapbooks being released in early 2019.