qarrtsiluni

by Laura Shovan

My daughter
says she will
join me
on the steps
with a book
while I
regard our
back garden.
She does not come.
In the heat
and stillness,
movement.
A praying mantis
in the lattice
and clematis vine,
body mottled
brown speckled,
head like
a heart or
arrow. It
hangs from a
wood slat,
shadowed.
Green intention.
I think it will
eat the aphids
gathered yellow
on the vine
but it wavers,
its mind
is not in keeping
with mine,
walks its slow
sticky walk
some other
direction.
I wait for
my daughter.
She has promised
to come out.

Download the MP3

Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan (website) was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won the 2009 Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches.