Thursday, December 28, 2023

GAS Featured Poet: Arvilla Fee

 


Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College and is the poetry editor for the San Antonio Review. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, and her poetry book, The Human Side, is available on Amazon. For Arvilla, writing produces the greatest joy when it connects us to each other.




Time Out

 

I remove myself

from shoulders and elbows

jostling for position,

the stiff staccato beat

of a million harried feet.

I trade traffic lights

for skies pinpricked with stars,

high-rises for pines,

the smell of exhaust and sweat

for the dewy dampness of soil.

I curl cat-like on my blanket,

content to spoon the moon,

and fall asleep to the serenade

of crickets on the bluff.



Oh, Child of Mine

 

It was the doctor

who cut the cord,

your life blood,

your life bond to me.

It was she

who laid you

on my belly,

just above the womb

that once tucked you away

from the world.

But it was you

who cut the cord,

eighteen short years later,

cut the life blood,

cut the life bond to me.

It was you,

the untethered you,

who floated far beyond

the reach

of my now empty hands.




The Breath

 

of memories

fog my mind;

I can’t see through the pane.

I can’t see through the pain.

 

But I trace my fingers

in the condensation

and make a lopsided heart,

 

a heart that once held

the whole of you,

unbroken by tragedy,

 

that split second in time

that divided then and now

and left me unprepared

 

to navigate a world

never quite warm enough.




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