Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English for Clark State College and is the lead poetry editor for October Hill Magazine. She has published work in over 100 journals and magazines, and her poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: never leave home without a snack (just in case of an apocalypse). Arvilla’s favorite quote: "It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. To learn more, visit her website and check out her new poetry magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/
How to Eat An Over-Easy Egg
in Front of Your Ex
carefully,
deliberately,
fork cutting
straight down the middle,
yolk pooling
like a daisy-yellow pond,
perfect for dipping
butter-covered toast;
fold the bread,
drag it along the plate
in slow, circular motions,
absorbing,
never dripping—
never leaving the table
Momma Needs a Moment
just five minutes to close my eyes,
to allow my chest to rise and fall,
to let my mind go blank.
Put your badgering on a shelf,
tuck those questions under your arms,
and just let me be.
I cannot answer the rapid-fire requests
that press into the gray matter of my brain
like bullish thumbs against a tender wrist.
I cannot tell you what’s for dinner.
No, I don’t know where birds go
when they leave their nests.
I don’t know why the store
was completely out of grapes.
Just let me have this bubble;
I’ll close my eyes and imagine,
if only for a moment
that I have all the space I need.
I’ll stretch my arms over my head,
yawn,
listen to the coo of doves,
step into the sun’s warm orb,
and measure my brief autonomy
The Air Between Us
without the mixture of my molecules
and your molecules, the air is clearer,
fresher somehow, with a hint of jasmine,
pine, and tangerine—
without the verbal bullet holes and
the cock crowing, I can take a breath,
can spin around without hitting your ego,
fragile as it was—
without the rumbling of your empty
thunder, the sky has returned to me,
a prodigal piece of blessed haven,
The Mad Librarian
Everyone said he was crazy,
my grandfather,
but I liked to think of him as
unconventional.
OK—so maybe the five hens
that slept in old milk crates
on his front porch was a little crazy.
Maybe the life-size garden statue
of Edgar Allan Poe with a raven
sitting on his head was—
well, odd at best.
But the pinnacle of his peculiarity,
according to the wholesome folks in town,
was his insatiable love of books.
Having converted his 1920-something
house into a massive library
when I was just a kid,
I found the rows and rows of bookcases
perfectly normal! Little books, big books,
books that smelled like the earth itself,
books with water marks and wax seals.
Books with red covers, brown covers,
no covers at all—tattered pages clinging
desperately to the threads that bound them.
Grandfather often sat in a winged back chair,
a book perched upon his knee, a book open
on his lap, a book held between two gnarled hands,
his gold, wire-rimmed glasses perched smartly
on the end of his thin nose.
I stepped on his glasses once, breaking both lenses,
but he kept reading with them anyway,
said it gave him a whole new perspective.
And it’s those glasses, sitting demurely on the last stack
of books he read that now waver behind the salty film
of tears in my eyes. I blink twice, put the specs on my face,
Hazy Days
Clouds stretch thin
like prim Puritan lips;
the sun pouts
from behind the sultry veil,
searing the soil with her breath.
I stretch out on a lounger,
sweet tea glass to my forehead
icy condensation dripping
down flushed cheeks.
The bees fly in slow motion,
tipsy on pollen,
This is summer’s sweet spot,
the arc of time where days stretch
like melted salt-water taffy,
the radio scratches out Beatle songs,
and I forget about everything
except a raspberry sorbet
in the freezer.
straight down the middle,
yolk pooling
like a daisy-yellow pond,
