Archive
Quick Brew
Monday morning’s a three-minute brew, a click
at every turn in the kitchen to quicken
the oncoming hour. Fix a rushed breakfast
and down it doing slapdash dance steps,
only to be caught unaware by a sudden splash
of sunlight on pink tiles, how it warms and slows
the ankles back to sultry Sunday’s drift.
Still, it’s time to run and get the spreadsheet glowing
between bites and steps, to dive into an analytical grid,
square and tuck in diamonds of fact
while surreptitiously opening a blank page
to gleam behind apparent logic.
This one. No warmth here until I lay it in,
but the prodding intellect can’t divine
what makes skin leap to sun as soul to music.
Sneak a poem between the cells. Sip an image lightly,
quickly, leaning one shoulder back
toward slower rhythms, while facing
forward and typing smart into the glare.
by Rachel Dacus
Penny
A pip, a tip, once a minute
of parking, its worth snipped,
a coin less in diameter or value
than a nickel yet brighter, warm sun
to a five-cent moon — so how did it roll
down to ground level, flat
disc lying unretrieved on streets,
forlorn beside the parking meters
it can no longer feed?
I’m penny-wise and foolish
about artifacts, keep penny bowls
on bookshelves, as if the penny and I, now middle-
aged, had grown up in the same town,
walked the same streets, rolled to the beach
on Saturdays. The cent has diminished
though not dimmed, while I’ve dimmed
and enlarged my diameter.
It’s natural between old friends, the change
of places. We might be change
made from the same register,
sad breakdowns of a haughty dime
taxed to the minutest, rendered
and reckoned as beyond Caesar’s interest, left
to the heart’s differently hued
apportion and shine.
by Rachel Dacus
qarrtsiluni 