“Two Chairs,” by Lizzy Beck (Poetry ’20)

“Two Chairs,” a poem by 2020 graduate Lizzy Beck, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:

Two Chairs

Beside the health center you saw two chairs:
wooden, solid, placed
just so, as in a draftsman’s rendering.

They sat inside a bed of daffodils—
not two-toned
but yellow all the way through. The chairs

were empty. Had to be. You had a momentary
wish to meet
the giddy gardener who had planted daffodils

right up to the chairs’ legs, so the chairs would be
swimming in blooms,
the seats like placid rafts the yellow waters

sometimes lapped. If you pick your way through,
delicate and discerning
in your bare feet, you must then raise your legs

out of the cluster, cross them well, and sit
as if an island.
You must commit to quiet…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/lizzy-beck-two-chairs/