Frogs that slept all day, wake and sing
songs of thanksgiving for swarming gnats,
blood-fat mosquitoes, water-walkers
that venture close. They roll up
sticky tongues and pump the bellows
of their lungs. Jo-rie’s lighter makes
a small flame, cherries her Marlboro.
She sighs.
Jo-rie is on the deck, chores done;
sun-scented sheets in her basket,
doves nodding on the line. All
is right, she says, with the world.
She paces, back and forth,
back and forth, too restless to sit.
Come see, she whispers at the window;
I slip outside.
Twilight reveals watersnakes
paired on the lawn. Bodies half-erect,
they sway hypnotically, undulate,
entwine in atavistic ritual. Beautiful,
she sighs, crushes out her cigarette.
Bats flit, like dragonflies,
before the moon.
Pines stand shoulder to shoulder
against the dark. A tardy sandhill crane
ripsaws low above the estuary.
Where was Annie when the lights
went out? Jo-rie teases. Where? I ask.
In the dark! An old joke, we giggle
longer than it deserves. A nightbird calls,
Jo-rie. Jo-rie.
Ann Howells has edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years, recently going digital. Her publications include Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag), Under a Lone Star (Village Books), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter), and an anthology she edited, Cattlemen & Cadillacs (Dallas Poets Community). Her chapbook manuscript, Softly Beating Wings, recently won the William D. Barney Memorial Chapbook Contest. Her poems appear widely here and abroad.