red booth
review
issue 4teen
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Asthenia
The languorous Mojave,
the equatorial latitudes of summer
in my own ivied yard.
I bake. My skull burns, I
am sawdust in the heat
and speak of comfort to all who will listen;
water, shade, breeze,
not tropics, no heat wave, no summer’s oven.
I was not made for this, me
of pallid skin and pale eyes.
I want an aura of protection,
a penumbra to shelter me,
a cottage of cool around my form,
longing to be incorporeal ‘til winter.
Topography
We each have a topography
that defines us and therefore suits us.
Mine is the shale covered hills
of northeast Ohio. Delicate woods.
Deciduous trees. Fallow fields.
Mud and rising creek beds.
Country homes one hundred feet or more
from the road lined with roughly cut wood fences.
The space expansive.
In town, Rockefeller mansions,
yards sloping down from house to street,
tree lawns interjected with oaks and maples.
Front porches. Wide streets.
Air that dries your skin to cracking in winter
and soaks your clothes in lazying summer heat.
Puddles of storm water and oil.
A feel. A sound. A look.
All else I measure by these things.
- Cathy Barber
| Cathy's work has
been published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Tattoo Highway, King
Log, Paper Wasp, The Kerf, The Bohemian, and in the anthologies An Eye
For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11 and nth position’s
Times New Roman. She has an MA from California State University,
Hayward, where she won awards for her poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
She lives in San Mateo, California. |
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