My Father’s Shoes
I fell in a spiral and never stopped looking for balance.
Look at your silhouette. It is always on the move.
You children are only visitors in our lives
My father looked at his shoes when he said it.
The weight of the garage full of cars
Is something to rise from. What is up there?
Lois was homesick for a place she’d never been
Yet. It made us all sad when she said it.
My father’s shoes held him lightly. The truth
Makes you calm.
*
The numbers listed on the certificate were wrong.
Nobody noticed. The computer stalled.
It takes twelve hours to live for a day
Twelve hours to fill the night of that day.
Halfway around each of them reaches.
A brown paper bag shows what it holds
One morning my father’s mustache was gone.
Only his upper lip was naked.
Scheherazade doesn’t have time to entertain fear.
The thought of the next resides in the now.
*
I am losing vision. the light is blinding.
Trash trucks have the morning all to themselves.
Claude is French. She said the knife that cut her meat
Cut onion first. White Castle burgers and buns
ran together . Dr. Seuss was like all of us. We loved him
for his kind diminishment of others that saved
our place at the table. My body knew to switch
the phone from my right ear to the left
In sleep my heart is on the run. My body
Works hard. It makes up thoughts
The Weight of Water
We slipped away from the light and the air All by ourselves with no way to breathe.
You can know death without dying. You stop being yourself until somebody
Brings you back and you might gasp For the air that you lost. It can never be found.
It will always be absent and you live without it Around the place it should have been.
Judith Bowles is the author of two collections of poetry: The Gatherer (2014) and Unlocatable Source (2019), both published by WordTech Communications’ Turning Point Press. She was poet in residence at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, Washington, in April of 2019. She earned her MFA from the American University where she taught creative writing. Previously she led a poetry group at Iona Senior Center for many years. Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Innisfree Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, Better Than Starbucks, Ekphrastic Review and Cobalt.