Sherry Chandler

A while since I put a new poem up on the poem page. Have been distracted by family concerns of one kind and another.

I couldn’t make the Sideshow reading at the Lexington Gallery Hop on Friday so decided I’d put up a little bit of nonsense called “Three Rings” that I did playing around with overhead transparencies and my marker set. It looked better hanging from a helium balloon. Many thanks to Joanie DiMartino for reading my poem for me.

All the Sideshow readings are over, but the show hangs until April 30. If you find yourself in the vicinity of the Carnegie Center, drop in and take a look.

Margaret Ricketts is the third poet I’ve featured this month whom I first met in Jim Hall’s master class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington. Margaret, a fellow member of Mosaic, is currently an MFA student at American University in Washington, D.C. She lives across the street from the Department of Homeland Security. Does that make her feel more secure?

When we talk about the war

When   we   begin     to   talk   about   the
war,   I   reach   for   my   heaviest

sweater   to   drape   comfort   around
me,     fingertips   searching

for   familiar   textures.       My   footsoles
lose   the   feel   of   their   familiar   places,

walk   me   into   furniture   unshifted
twenty   years.       What   can   I   love

more   than   safety?     When     we   sit   over
after-dinner   coffee,   talking   about   present

futility   and   future   losses,     I   feel a     stirring   within
me,       as   reliable,     predictable   as   wine   or   sex.     Your

faces   are   pale,     wise   in   foreboding.     My   ribcage
aches   with   the   fragile   possibility   of   a   way   out.

When   the   war   comes,   only   this   yearning     will
tell   me   who   I   am.