by Ronda Piszk Broatch

I’m tired because of the way the country is running
around with its scissors pointed the wrong way.

There are people wandering the wilderness,
geo-caching lies, eating them like potato chips.

The fence around my ventricles is coming apart.
Somebody just sent a message sliding across my screen,

and I fell for it. Instead of a pizza,
Amazon delivers a baby.

I want to write poems, but the kettle calls to be boiled,
the eggs are boiling even after the water molecules have

rejoined the atmosphere, and someone’s burning gas
from the tank of a car that hasn’t run in five years.

Never mind what I’ve lived through—sleeping
beneath a pool table, clinging to my horse’s neck

in a pasture of cows, listening to an ex-boyfriend cry
about the time he made pasta for the mafia.

I don’t drink coffee
and still my cups are stained.

There’s a box full of letters that need translating.
There’s a collection of scissors in jars around my house,

petrified pizza crust in the back of my mother’s old Dodge.
When the babies cried, we drove and drove and drove.

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Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, The Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s "All Things Considered." She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

by Ronda Piszk Broatch

I put in radishes because they seem in such a hurry.
The garden weeded, free of buttercup, dandelion,
and I tossed out a whole sack of wildflower seeds

I’d hung onto for years, not knowing where to sow.
The birds must have looked the other way, busy
with new-laid eggs, the soil now covered with green stars.

Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes we have to shake the ghost globe,
ask the ancestors where they wish to travel today.

In the distance a dog barks. Sometimes my dead
remind me of stars I’d all but forgotten.
There were prisoners who drank poison, some

who threw themselves against the electric wires,
out of windows—they were so afraid of dying
somewhere else. This morning I water strawberry plants

fading in a black planter, worry about people I don’t know
dying in nursing homes, in cages along the border.
What if truth was loud enough, even the deniers heard

and began to believe? This morning I pull a snail
away from beneath the leaves of the bay plant, uncover
a tree frog beneath a pot of soil, and nothing growing in it.

The snail was beautiful. The frog was hesitant
to leave the bowl of my glove for the unknown territory
of a tulip leaf.

It’s what I’ll never know
sometimes saves me.

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Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered,” among others.

by Ronda Piszk Broatch

red wine tells me so    and poetry

come hell        come mother flooded

sky igniting  tossing cottonwoods

upon raftered lids        O gale conjurers

O maples in bodacious feather

needle-strewn fir on lawns across town

High    I was that       and more than half

gone    I saw like an animal

in darkness      all things couched between

the lines           How long must I wait for

sanity to return            bear this dis-

quiet like a head in vice-grip

muscle-shudder           love-a-lurk

an albino gorilla

in my childhood closet            O mother

the tide comes high     nigh your heart

and still so much has yet to be conceived

and still our mouths sewn shut resist

wind damped against lips       O keeper

of the owls defying night        you sent me

little planet      to float on my own

with my little box of bones

golden-eyed and bared

into an orbit too long   and undiscovered

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Poet and photographer Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a May Swenson Poetry Award finalist, and former editor of Crab Creek Review. Her journal publications include Atlanta Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered.” She has work forth-coming in Sycamore Review, Palette Poetry, and Tishman Review.