He Calls Her Etsy
The wire man springs off the metal pot filled with Spanish moss. Not
that he needs to sit, with those trellis legs upright, the effort it takes
to bend something like a knee, but he’s been with the boiled wool
woman, admiring her seams and the way her waist makes a crook. She
can’t stand on her own but she leans with grace on the glass emerald
bonsai list with sunlight that goes right through him. She absorbs the
light, has a fullness the wire man can’t stop thinking about. If she says
yes, he thinks, they will make love under the emerald tree, his sharp
edges curved in, her rippable skin warm under her heart-pocket dress.
Later he will make her a mouth.
—
This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!
Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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