Archive
On Seeing “Envy Barn” in the Real Estate Listings
It is what we want, though
we’ve never even heard of one,
a barn of spectacle, maybe,
structure out back that holds
it all. So what if a property’s price
vaults six figures at least?
Worth it, yes, more than any cow-house
or mere hall of stalls, the envy barn
sets a place apart. Not just
in the sticks, we’re talking suburbia,
and it holds quadruple the cattle,
twenty-nine tractors,
un-nameable fields of hay.
Windowed, solar heated, flash
air-conditioned, Berber carpeted,
self-cleaning with three teak-walled lofts,
titanium piping, and the tools there
won’t rust. That it doesn’t
have a cellar makes no difference:
in the envy barn, it is all about
up. It rises above the ground,
the neighborhood, above any god
of a realtor that might even think
of selling short. It is
sheer impossibility meant
to stand on land, and it is gorgeous
and it is enormous,
and it is what we want.
Amy MacLennan has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio and Rattle. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press. One of her poems is available as a downloadable broadside from Broadsided Press.
Looking for an Oracle
Spool it on out for me: where to turn left,
the bananas to pick, the men to catch,
the men to ditch, tell me when my nails
will break and the roof will fail,
tip me to gossips and scratched-out phone book names,
list out my losses (hearing gone in ten years,
the loves I’ll bury),
line them up so I can swallow them all
without the coil of worry —
choice never stopped the clots in anyone’s veins
or the smooth sky pressing down,
and I want my days laid flat,
my facts splayed out, a plan, a map,
to the last damn chicken bone
that sticks in my throat.
Amy MacLennan has been published or has work forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio and Rattle. Her poems are forthcoming in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press.
qarrtsiluni 