Because we were very young we conjured a movie with a monster
in our thin suburban woods. I was the girl in white never more open,
so receiving. I could whippet through the trees. Please have that thrill
run down my spine. I wore white. I could catch my breath
like a wind over the moor. The sun shone—a miracle above the leaves
which were falling, the ground spotted like an old organ. Fairy tale
crystal ball something dropped. No music but the huff huff
huff. I wore white which looked better as belief shadow-sculpted away.
There was a right place and a manner to get there. The light with that
transparent shine. We confused cellophane with cinema, our innocence
a kindness in the backyard. Sent without a script. Ravens just an ornament.
–
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize, and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.