Read More: A brief Q&A with Lois Marie Harrod
Binary
In those days there were two of us,
sometimes you were the one
sometimes me, though I often felt nothing,
you always on and I off or a little off,
a little young, a bit unready,
but we worked together, discovered,
how much we could generate,
and so it didn’t seem complicated
to be separate, single, particulate,
lone star, odd star, one and only star,
in an empty universe.
Then we grew pods with little peas,
each a perfect zero, off and ought, on or naught.
The power of nothing did its simple addition
under the trees, the grass nixed the morning sun,
it was just one great zippo everyday
while our children, our two and only,
played baseball from dawn to nil,
Zip the bat, Zilch the ball
from early moon until zero,
we switched them now and then
like bubbles, watched them pop
in and out of existence though our best psychologists
said this was more about sex than numbers.
At night they conspired to seethe
like two steam engines,
puffing their little ciphers
up and down the track.
Several Months Before You Were Born,
I Married a Man Who Wasn’t Your Father
– after Lynden Cline’s eponymous sculpture
So listen: your father was sweeter than Jesus
but he fluxed the Ford, trying to grab the rattles
gloating in the frame. If he had been meaner
he would have shaken the throats
of those kids chattering in the balcony
while he was preaching to the scold-maids.
Off course, lambs squirmed away too,
every one of them with his loaves and fishes,
and he couldn’t marry me either, no, not ever.
You’ve had five husbands, he said,
like that Samaritan woman,
and the man you’re now living with now
isn’t. Didn’t turn out well either for that Magdalene
kneeling beside me those stark Sunday mornings,
something about the windows, stained. […]
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Woman Finds Her Face
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Lois Marie Harrod’s Spat was published in May 2021. Her 17th collection Woman won the 2020 Blue Lyra Blue Lyra Prize. Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 (Five Oaks); her chapbook And She Took the Heart, in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemeis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Online link: www.loismarieharrod.org
“Binary,” “Several Months Before You Were Born…” and “Woman Finds Her Face” originally appeared in One, River Heron Review, and River Styx, respectively.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Lois Marie Harrod