Paulette Guerin Bane
Paulette Guerin lives in Arkansas and teaches writing, literature, and film. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Best New Poets, epiphany, Contemporary Verse 2, and Carve Magazine. A suite of 25 poems appears in the anthology Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry. She is the author of Wading Through Lethe and the chapbook Polishing Silver. Her website is pauletteguerin.com.
Keo, Arkansas
A wooden walk snakes between cypress trees,
their roots wide and awkward as wading boots.
Turtles jaw the air. They follow us around the pier.
On the way back to town, we pass the site
of my mother-in-law’s childhood home,
the acres they sharecropped, the tattered mansion
of the man who owned the land. She recalls
that while her brothers scoured the grove
for pecans, she ran barefoot to the Toltec mounds,
sun rising above the tallest one. Like a god.
Clonmacnoise
Windswept, we walked among high kings
crowned with lichen. We wove between crosses,
snapped shots along a ribbon of River Shannon,
then followed a shrill cry to the ruined cathedral.
In the cleft of a rock, a sparrow was tethered,
twine gripping its foot. Newly wed, I hardly understood
as the bird shrieked and stabbed the hand
meant to free it, then disappeared.
