https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
Two Poems, by Apryl Fox.
A Memoir of Sylvia Plath
I think I was more than a poet in a past life,
maybe Sylvia Plath or John Donne,
who was always going off about the weather.
"When will it rain in Spain?"
Snow comes, then I will be happy."But Sylvia Plath wasn't happy. Each and every day
she wrote three poems by the fire, then Ted
would read them aloud to the village children,
just to keep them out of the cold. Once,
she was afraid they would drown,
even though it was winter and the river was frozen.The children were always cold and hungry and lived
in a single shack out by the river.
They came frequently to listen to Ted read Sylvia's poems,who wrote about birds, the weather,
and old men who looked like her father.
She had not seen him in such a long time,
so she wrote a poem about not remembering what he looked like.
All For Love
It is such a nice evening that I comment on your appearance,
how your eyes appear deep like the ocean,
and you give me that old eye-roll, as if you could not
believe that I would comment on the ocean when I
know it is forty miles away.
A sprinkler is goes off in the yard next door,
and children are shouting in the still-hot evening as
they play tag or Follow-the-Leader. A sea gull screams,
far away from its home.
My t-shirt seems to be second skin, stuck to my back
like melted plastic, and I take a sip of Coke.
Recycle the bottle when you are done, you
say patiently, as if you are a goddess trying to explain to a mere
mortal how the universe works.
All in the name of love, I answer and chuckle, tracing my fingers over
the three arrows shaped in a triangle on the back of
the bottle that must have a secret meaning I alone am meant to
discover.
Apryl Fox has been published in Erete's Bloom, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Locust Magazine and Word Riot. She won honorable mention in a poetry contest by St. Mary's College in Michigan, and is currently working on three novels.