https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-06-19 20:00:162022-02-25 17:13:15“W A K E : A SLEEP IN FORTY-SOMETHING WINKS” by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry ’15)
It’s okay. I, too, have failed at the expected, have sputtered and choked like a rusty valve in water, have jumped into the pool only to sink. Little engine, your flawed machinery is nothing like love. You limp at last call to the dance floor, but feel no shame
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Fifty-seven-year-old Sharecropper Woman. Hinds County Mississippi
When there are no doctors you do what you can, a dime with a hole on a string tied around each ankle to prevent headaches. Her bare feet rest on the planks of a porch, her feet so calloused it’s hard to feel splinters. How many miles have they walked among rows?
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If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot. Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.
Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door. Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.
Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell. For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.
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An excerpt from “My Early Twenties” by Lesley Howard (fiction ’18), published by Narrative.
My Early Twenties
End of April, New York, my friend Liza picked me up for my Hardee’s morning shift, an act of deep love because I had to clock in at four thirty in the a.m. I said something about a best friend being better than a lover, and she squinted at me like it was a November afternoon when the sun slants in at that awful angle and the glare is blinding, regardless of sunglasses.
“You’re prickly,” she said. “Fight with David last night?”
We hadn’t fought but we hadn’t done anything else either. Liza reached for her ever-present coffee mug; it wasn’t there and she muttered, “Damn, where’d my mug go?” and turned around to ask her four-year-old daughter, nickname of Pixie, to ask if she had Mommy’s cup and that was all that was said about my mood, but she is a psychic, seriously, her own storefront and some A-list Broadway clients she’s protective of. And although she never says anything about what she can’t help but know, I go around knowing she knows and usually it’s not a problem because we are old friends, from Pixie’s age on, the kind of friend that’s essentially family. All to explain that we didn’t say anything, but I got out at the Hardee’s feeling like I’d already worked my shift and was dredged in butter and dusted in flour.
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In his dishevelled garden my neighbor Has fourteen varieties of apples, Fourteen trees his wife put in as seedlings Because, being sick, she wanted something Different to do (different from being sick).
In winter she ordered catalogues, pored Over subtleties of mouthfeel and touch: Tart and sweet and crisp; waxy, smooth, And rough. Spring planted an orchard, Spring projected summers
Of green and yellow-streaked, orange, red, Rusty, round, wormholed, lopsided; Nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable. Gardens grow backward and forward In the mind; in the driest season, flowers.
