Losing
I did not know my heart lost this match,
was not even clear before I started how
the game was played. One minute you
were a boy in biology class, a face on
the court at a basketball game with your
floppy brown hair. In mere days the smell
of your neck lit in me a brushfire of longing,
whole acres alight. Your breath and kiss,
where you spent a Saturday night, how
the slant of your “ll”s looked in a note
you left in my locker, saying
call you later, all now urgent markers
on this map of you, my senses tuned
to every radio frequency. My heart
skipped away to your side of the street,
mocked me, handing you every tool
needed to love me and hurt me—how
unaware I was of the easy slide from one
to the other, how taking back my
attention and unlatching
my love would dismantle me, pile
fear in my chest like
a hillside of junkyard wrecks.
My Mother Sleeps at Home
Back in her bed, in a house she loves
despite its emptiness, its distance
from us, her children. Is it the light
at five AM waking her with its slant
across the river? Is it every windows’
watery smile? How much the waves
whisper of her past? Here
she is close to the golden and tarnished
thoughts of my father. He is a hammer
echoing up from the basement,
a calling from the life he built
into the walls, never telling her
how much she mattered, but the river
view and screen porch were his
cathedral, his only way to worship.
Who knows how they whispered
of this house, how many nights
before it was built, he helped her
picture the very spot where she now
sleeps, alone and lonely, but
caressing still who they were. Her
arms wrapped in one of his old
flannel shirts, the tears dry as they
always do and she goes out into
April sunshine to plant lettuce.
Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Northern Virginia with her husband and two mostly grown kids. Wandering in the woods and across the page are two of her favorite activities. Her work has been published in journals such as: The American Journal of Poetry, Gargoyle, and The Potomac Review. She has two chapbooks of poetry: Noticing the Splash with BoneWorld Press and Water Shedding with Finishing Line Press and her collection of short fiction, A Drawn and Papered Heart has been shortlisted in multiple contests.