We are pleased to offer our Poets Read series in honor of National Poetry Month 2019 and will run it throughout the month of April.
Every day in April, our website and our YouTube channel will feature the voice of a poet whose work has appeared in our pages over the past year. On Sundays, we will offer two poets for your enjoyment.
Today’s poem is Something About Marriage by Lois Marie Harrod and it appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Gyroscope Review.
Something about Marriage
by Lois Marie Harrod
It’s not that one morning you decide
to walk out of your little house—
the cabin at the edge of the Minnesota woods
or the semi-detached in rural New J
and go into the cold in your thin cotton gown
and calloused feet,
it’s the chill that slides into your kitchen
and stands behind you
as you measure out the coffee,
the nip that slips into the bedroom as you bent to smooth the sheets,
like one of those ghosts you’ve dreamed
wafting down the corridor
at the mental hospital, the sudden rush
of cold that makes you know
how solitary you are. And you are not sure
if the icy wraith is telling you something you already guessed
or if this is a revelation:
the fire in the hearth
which you have imagined flickering all these years
is gone.
Of course, sometimes like frost
the chill is brief.
About the Poet: Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th and most recent collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016, and Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. She is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey. Links to her online work at http://www.loismarieharrod.org.