LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque, which was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She is also a painter who once worked with acrylics but now concentrates on digital painting via Procreate on her iPhone and iPad. She lives in Cincinnati.
What Glass Is
Glass shows itself through what
it holds, as in a Janet Fish still life—
four old-fashioned tumblers like
the ones in restaurants for water,
before you had to say you’d like
water with the menu. Here the water
fills up the almost-invisible glasses
set on a glass table outside, somewhere.
The bottoms of the glasses kiss
their upside-down likenesses
that swim up to the table’s surface
as fast as starving koi. The glasses
might obscure the road that goes somewhere,
surrounded by woods on either
side, except that we see the scene,
the road disappearing, again and again,
a swirl of green and ochre, repeating
concentric circles of lemon-lime grass, indigo
sky, fir trees bending in the water, filling
the curvy tumbler, tumbling the view.
Composition
balances, the way it settles the wings
of the shoulder blades, how my mind becomes
another thing, a composition in greasy oils,
which takes time, which allows no fussing over,
the mind’s surplus of feeling in need of the blade
of the palette knife, scraping off the errors
I was fussing over for too long, muddying
what should be clear—taking time to clean
the excess of color with a palette knife
so it has time to dry in the sun, so the trees
show in their clear tones of green and brown,
so I don’t drive off into spinning mud,
so the sun dries the trees in their perfect being,
so you’ll see what I mean, meant all the time.
Screen Porch
Still tangled together in bed, we keep on talking
like water overlapping, small slaps
at a blue pool’s edge, like riders
walking their horses home,
like two people rocking on the porch swing,
loath to go in to the bright yellow light.
The Renaissance of Grandparenthood
Grandparents, if they’re lucky,
get to go down the lane again,
make up stories, say “Let’s play like
we’re pirates with the costume earrings,
now we’re princes, now we’re home again,”
get to see what once they had no time
to see—how lost earrings make a pirate’s
loot—and know their child should be painted by
a Mary Cassatt. They see, this time around,
the curves that made Giotto’s cherubim,
the child in the painting all of them
at any time, and those who sit in court
should recognize Giotto’s cherubim
from a blue mosaic sky—gold and earth tones
seen and shown with awe, any court aware
of a chessboard that is garden, toads and all.
Two Seasons: An Elegy for My Second Husband
In the video
your daughter posted last night,
Tokyo petals
loiter, swirl, circle—
a blizzard like a slow dance
of cherry blossoms
in the lantern light,
like that night in early spring
I left you at Good
Sam and it started
to sleet as I was driving.
I was terrified
until the flurries
distracted me. Like flowers
riding the headlights
accompanying
my journey home to our kids,
escorted by snow.
