by Lisa Rhoades

Even mown, the field shines gold,
grasses fanning up in a whorl—
reverse sunrays—pointing
to the overcast sky,
a halo hammered thin.

The field, the players,
the flattened baseline,
the ball sailing
to the wild edge of things—
all around you the world
makes itself right. The rose
continues its conversation
with the railing
you’ve lashed it to;
the black walnut spills
its fruit, a perfect gift
inside a bitter hull.

Even bruised,
your marriage plows on.
Why are you astonished
at the landmarks
you’ve been given:
the mulberry at the corner,
the dog’s head upon your thigh,
the sparrows below the feeder
scratching for something more?

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Lisa Rhoades is the author of two full length collections of poetry, The Long Grass (Saint Julian Press, 2020) and Strange Gravity (Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series, 2004), Currently a pediatric nurse in Manhattan, she lives on Staten Island with her spouse. Individual poems have appeared widely including in Calyx, Nimrod, Boulevard, and The Southern Review.

by Lisa Rhoades

loves dandelions and stands
with an open globe,
and then blows and shrieks
and looks for the next. In the ball field
where we let the dogs run
the grasses have gone to seed,
the baseball diamond is unraked, the basketball
hoops removed, so that kids in quarantine
won’t try to play, won’t yell
and shout and jump this spring.
She won’t remember this. She won’t
remember how we held our breath.
The broad leaf plantain nods
its swollen bud, bindweed twists
through the chain links, a constellation of pink
clover swirls through the smaller white.
She picks flowers one by one.
She sends them flying
on the path of her breath.
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Lisa Rhoades is the author of The Long Grass (Saint Julian Press, 2020) and Strange Gravity (Bright Hill Press, 2004). Individual poems have appeared at Barrow Street, Poetry East, Prime Number, Saranac Review, South Carolina Review, and Psaltery & Lyre among others. In addition to teaching poetry, she works as a pediatric nurse in Manhattan. She lives on Staten Island with her spouse and their two children. Find her online at lisarhoades.com.

by Lisa Rhoades

Dear friend, this morning I opened the front door to find
a small dead bird on the welcome mat,
lying on its side, unbloodied, just still,
probably from a quick smash
against the beveled glass. It wasn’t a sparrow,
but was sparrow-sized, and brown with black stipples on its tail.
I carried it to the farthest corner of the yard
and dropped it into composting leaves.

It’s three days shy of the anniversary of your death,
which is to say, just a Tuesday in July, not
the day itself, or the day I learned the news, or the day
we lifted your memory to God, but maybe the one
on which we met in the hallway at church
and you reminded me of your upcoming trip,
and I told you we would miss you
at the baseball game.

So I mark the morning as I do most days,
with a list of tasks that must get done.
I start early with weeding the garden beds, pruning
the bittersweet by the fence, dragging the reaching tendrils
from where they’ve caught in the magnolia branches,
and pulling them from the dirt
where they’ve reached back to send up suckers
throughout the yard.

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Lisa Rhoades is the author of The Long Grass, forthcoming from Saint Julian Press in early 2020, and Strange Gravity, selected by Elaine Terranova for the Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series (2004). Her work has been published in such journals as The Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Saranac Review, and Smartish Pace. She lives on Staten Island with her spouse and their two children.