[Table of Contents]
[Editor's Note]
[Masthead]
[Guidelines]
[Resources]
Aubade
I wake at five to stainless light;
We've rocked the dark away,
Our breath, our bodies all
That warm the winter room.
Your heart knocks its mooring.
Going is a destination;
In this pale hour between two snows
Only small birds must move.
___
The Terminal
Here airport screens sift, blank
as runways. Windows sit empty too;
nothing descends but snow.
Pending, all day, we linger,
stranded in memory, sleeping with baggage.
Nailed to the picture window,
Great-grandma watches urchins
skating: It's her street—they laugh
and swerve between cars
and the stone curb. O,
the terminal, the times are wrong.
The world of clocks on this white wall
drifts, distant as dead sons.
She lifts a stranger's hands
to wait in cold for the long flight nowhere,
the numb journey home.
___
Jeannette Barnes, reference and technology instruction librarian (U of Alabama, 2002), b. Connecticut, grew up in Virginia, the West Indies, Colorado. Studied at Colorado College, Phillips University, University of West Florida, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, taught English as a Second Language in Japan. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Award, winner of the Nebraska Award in Poetry and the Bridges Prize. Verse out soon in Alligator Juniper, Common Ground Review, the anthology Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace. See Michael Meyer's Poetry: An Introduction and The Complete Bedford Introduction to Literature, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, the database PoemFinder, Nimrod International, Wind, Shenandoah, Nebraska Review, Greensboro Review, Florida Review, Yankee, Potomac Review, Kalliope, Poets ON, many more. She is a snow queen and likes to call herself a resourceress.