A pen would be good or maybe a knife. You were a boy and then
I was. One of us sitting and one as if we could stand. The lintel
never reached. The door jamb and the door. This is the mark
that makes it a fact—I was here as a boy and a man. And now
bending again but not in that cartilage way as if all boy
bones were shark. I have swum through the door and further
onto the street. I can hear the dishes clinking, the plates.
I can hear your call from the other room and closer something
like teeth. The trees grind as if they could chew, the squirrels lining
up with their metronome tails. The houses black as mountains or tents.
–
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 2021, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.