Home
Books
Biography
Reviews
Appearances
Workshops &
Resume Contact
Recognition & Service Poems
Articles
Links Order Books
NEW
Poems from Dirt Sandwich
(Press 53)
Appeared in VERSE DAILY:
http://www.versedaily.org/2009/aboutlindaannasfergusonds.shtml
and Nominated for
Pushcart Prize
Journey
See, I am making all things new....
Revelations 21:5
I see the world from behind two
blades,
windshield wipers that never quite clean
the crust of an insect or let go
of a piece of leaf caught in the hinge.
The clock on the dashboard is wrong.
Music from the radio keeps time
with the rain, never breaking rhythm,
raspy song of rubber, fast on the highway.
Chi my journey, you are a distant place,
the road empty of others. I pass the dark
buildings, vacant lots; listen to my breath,
block out the pounding sounds
on the pavement, hear my own heart beat.
I know the feeling of being inside,
inside the lamplight beginning to burn
as I turn the corner of your street, inside
the cool walls of your bedroom, inside
the heat of the 40-watt bulb by your head
inside the skin of your sheets, inside
the space between desire and sleep, where
all that is fragile has entered you, spread
across your flesh like wrinkles, Wound
through your hair like gray. You whisper
"stay," to the small of my- palm, my cheek,
to all I thought was without need.
Copyright © 2009 Linda Annas Ferguson All
rights reserved
from
Dirt Sandwich / Press 53
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission
Also appeared in
The Wild Goose Poetry Review
Volume 3 Issue 2
http://www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com/files/Microsoft_Word_-_summer_2008.pdf
Nominated for Pushcart Prize
I Wanted to Hear Her Howl
Mother rarely raised her voice,
only sighed as she picked the eyes
from raw potatoes with fingers
that never knew polish or lotion,
never whined, trapped in the to and fro
of hanging wash on the line, slapping
overalls against the wind, taking them
down again, oblivious to the coarseness
against her skin, never wept as she cleaned
the floor, never danced with a broom,
spinning around the room.
She scrubbed mud stains with its bristles,
swept dust and crumbs outside
browning the green grass beyond the steps
where others said their goodbyes.
Most days and nights, the house held her in,
although the doors were never locked.
She rose early without swearing, stared
out the window where railroad ties began.
Beyond the trance of waving weeds
train whistles declared their leaving,
roaring in her head like a scream.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich:
http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
Wild Goose Poetry Review
http://www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com/files/Microsoft_Word_-_summer_2008.pdf
Volume 3 Issue 2
Appeared in PIRENE'S FOUNTAIN
http://www.pirenesfountain.com/current_issue/ferguson.html
Endings
You cannot get caught
in the same rain twice.
A transparent pearl
will not cling to your lash
when you close your eyes
to drink from the sky.
The heavens will not descend
like music. Wet notes
will not shatter when they touch
the strain of your tongue.
You will not notice how rain
tastes so strangely of nothing.
Your thirst will not be quenched
if you console every cloud.
People will pass all around
but they will see only
how the sun breaks on your back
as you walk away.
Copyright © Linda Annas
Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Pirene's Fountain:
http://www.pirenesfountain.com/current_issue/ferguson.html
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
Kentucky Writer's Coalition: Last Chance to Be Lost
Dance of Solitude
Dying begins with instinct,
a reflex in the womb,
slight flinch of foot,
a discontented elbow.
Born kicking air
before we can breathe,
we want all the years
we can get of dying,
not knowing how
much time we have
to practice, no
specifics on endings.
The first step we learn
is leaving, trading Edens
for uncertainties, even leaving
love when dancing feels like dying.
We all choreograph our separations,
two divided by two makes one-
learn to keep the rhythm, stay in step
even though there is no music.
This is the dance of solitude.
We'll show you our feet
with the sores on the soles, legs
kicking high as they will reach.
Copyright © Linda Annas
Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Press 53: Dirt
Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
South Carolina
Poetry Initiative: University of SC: Web Anthology
http://www.sc.edu/poetry/chapbook_09web.shtml#ferguson
Nine Days at Sea
"A poet died today,"
the two-week-old newspaper reports
from beneath lifeless bodies of black bass
as I filet them, stew for the crew,
slide the slippery entrails and eyes to one side,
wash away blood, lay them out by the rail
like corpses on a slab, while others flail and lash,
shaking their small bucket of water and salt.
The poet's name was Barbara,
biology maintaining she was mostly water,
connected to all leaving things by the sea,
by rain and rivers, sweat and saliva.
The ocean and sky have glared at me so long
I feel bodiless. The deep, a communal soup,
watches all my motions, the surge and ebb of me.
Gray backs of dolphin surface
and disappear. Light, slight as a minnow,
dives into the dark of the liquid horizon.
Copyright © Linda Annas
Ferguson All rights reserved
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
South Carolina Poetry Initiative: University of SC: Web
Anthology
http://www.sc.edu/poetry/chapbook_09web.shtml#ferguson
Poems from Bird Missing from
One Shoulder
My Mother Doesn’t Know
Me
To her, I’m the mild-mannered woman
who cooks her meals.
She is going to leave me a tip
when she finds her purse.
She sits for hours, eyebrow
cocked in a wrinkled study
as if she could fathom
the distance between us,
saves pieces of thread
in a coffee can,
picked from her afghan all day
while both our lives unravel.
Thanksgiving, she put a hammer
in the oven at 400 degrees,
spent the rest of the day
on the back porch step,
wanting only to leave
this strange house,
silently wringing her hands
as if her body could not contain her.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Finishing Line
Press: Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk
Twenty: South
Carolina Poetry Fellows, Hub City Press
The Ellen Douglas Everett Carruthers Memorial
Prize: Poetry Society of SC
Word Tech
Editions: Bird Missing from One Shoulder
Beyond
Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease
(Kent State University Press).
Laid Off
The machines weep their noise
as Father offers his card to the clock
on his last night at the cotton mill.
Time stares with one eye,
transfixed on him.
Cold shocks his lungs
as the metal door behind him shrugs
itself closed. The black windows
of the factory watch him walk home
as they have every dawn for 30 years.
They do not see him as I do
as he enters our door,
white lint clinging to his hair
like a disintegrating halo, dying
for an undemanding bed,
the joy of his aching body
twisted in the cogs of sleep.
I can hear the rasp of his throat,
disgruntled snore,
the gasp,
the letting go.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgment:
Finishing Line
Press: Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk
Word Tech Editions: Bird
Missing from One Shoulder
Poems from Stepping on Cracks in
The Sidewalk
What Would Jesus Say
if I asked him about the dream
I had last night of people falling
through my bedroom ceiling?
Would He explain in parables and
metaphors
how the soft losses of the heart
break through the thick rind of the
mind
or would he say nothing, only show me
clouds that form puzzles in the sky,
make thunder rumble in the distance,
his words sighing their meaning?
The dirt we were has nothing to tell us
as we bury our dead,
make tombstones that read,
Here lie music, art, and poetry.
Gardeners come to cut weeds
that tumble with gravity.
On our way back to sleeping and waking
we step on cracks in the sidewalk
that could be a warning
we might be falling toward God.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
WordTech Editions: Bird
Missing from One Shoulder
Finishing Line Press: Stepping
on Cracks in the Sidewalk
Aftershocks: The Poetry of
Recovery for Life-Shattering Events
Cold Black Water
Pretend there is no blue hen
drowned in the horse's trough
when you wake from your dream
of breaking eggs, not death
to surprise you, no black mirror
to swallow your reflection
when you look long
into the wakeless water
as if something valuable were lost,
the morning sun rising
like a floating heart
over the abandoned cornfield
while a cock dusts his feathers
in the dirt, pecks grit
to grind in his gizzard, sizes up
a mate to pick from the flock,
crows in another day.
The ghost of a weightless god
haunts the heat of your hand,
as you stare into ordinary air,
stir the lifeless flies.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgment:
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
Finishing Line Press:
Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk
Poems from Last Chance to Be
Lost
Choices
I search through my closet,
try to decide what to wear,
go through the house
luring mirrors to myself.
Clothes make me think of mama,
hanging wash outside on the line.
Choice to her was a hard wire
stretched across the yard.
When she looked down it,
all she could see was its vanishing point.
She never noticed
how her dresses
danced with the sun,
each to their own rhythm,
how the bells of her skirts
captured the wind,
how her blouses struck poses,
side by side, acting out different lives.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgements:
Skirt Magazine
Last Chance to be Lost,
Kentucky Writes' Coalition
WordTech Editions: Bird
Missing from One Shoulder
The Southern Poetry
Anthology: Volume I: South Carolina
The First Night
As we lie
side by side,
strangers,
my fingers search
your back,
feel the jagged edge
of the rib you gave
in your sleep
to make me.
For this night
I want
to put it back,
until I am bone
of your bone
and flesh
of your flesh
and you feel whole again.
In the morning
I will open the wound
so gently
you may not hear me
rise
and tiptoe
out of the garden.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
Palanquin Press, University of SC, Aiken: It's Hard to Hate a Broken
Thing
The 75th Anniversary
Anthology of the Poetry Society of Georgia's: The Hester Forshaw Constantine
Memorial Prize
The Southern Poetry
Anthology: Volume I: South Carolina
The River
Go down to the river,
put in a thin hand,
drink the reflection of stars.
As you gather the gold,
notice how it empties itself
of light, hold in your palm
all you never tasted.
Let your lips remember
the past, swallow
the dark and the cold.
Tell the river
how you loved me.
When you take back your hand
watch the ripple leave its center
and disappear.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
Press 53: Dirt Sandwich http://www.press53.com/BioLindaAnnasFerguson.html
North Carolina Poetry
Society's Award Winning Poems
Kentucky Writers' Coalition: Last Chance to Be Lost
Poems from It's Hard to Hate a
Broken Thing
Palanquin Press, University of SC,
Aiken
Beyond the Window
The tree outside mama’s window
is filled with waiting apples
never quite right for pie.
Her children climb its boughs
in search of one less sour
while the ground rots the rest.
Petals lie at the rose’s foot.
She thinks of her husband’s love
true as a thorn,
honest as harsh noon light.
The unwatched potatoes on the stove
are overcooked, the water wasting away.
She stirs without looking,
tastes for salt,
gazes through the glass pane
cracked in a quarrel years ago
but never fixed.
It doesn’t bother her now.
It’s hard to hate a broken thing.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments
WordTech Editions: Bird
Missing from One Shoulder
Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina
Aiken:
It's Hard to Hate a Broken
Thing
Family Reunion
I have to reach deeper each year
for all that is stored
in the pockets of this house.
This is a day we have to slow ourselves
to feel what time has deepened.
My own body, half-remembering,
lingers in a doorway.
Children pick plums
off the near-bare tree
outside the kitchen.
The day dissolves into hungry reaching.
Mother watches at the window
drinking in the one life she must live,
rolls lint in her apron pocket,
suffers love in the smallest of things.
She is tired now,
a fragile cup to be hummed into.
I can hear a familiar lullaby
in her good-byes.
We leave all at once
like awkward adolescents
avoiding an intimacy,
mother’s hands folded on her lap
to fill its emptiness.
We are already
thinking of tomorrow
as if the past
is just a house we visit.
Copyright ©
Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgments:
WordTech Editions: Bird
Missing from One Shoulder
Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina
Aiken: It's Hard to Hate a Broken
Thing
Rituals
It’s a quarter past four in the morning.
In every corner of the mill, screaming
machines shake old and oily floors.
The whole room vibrates. Willie pauses
at the end of an aisle, dusts cotton lint
from both sleeves, his hair. He reaches
through moving gears with his hands,
ties loose ends, fibers flying,
renegotiates the rhythm of repetition.
At five, he will have a cup of coffee,
short smoke by the time clock.
He dreams of leaving, running away
from debt and duty. It’s the loud roar
of his thoughts that keeps him here.
Later, he will remark how the sky
looks like rain as he races ahead
of a cloud, opens the door
to rented rooms, wife still asleep,
hangs his coat on the nail by the stove,
stokes coals, stirs remains
of the fire, pokes at restless flames.
Copyright © Linda Annas Ferguson All rights reserved
Acknowledgment:
The Post and Courier Prize
Poetry Society of SC
Winter 2008
http://www.poetrysocietysc.org/po0809/rituals.html
Copyright ©
Linda Annas
Ferguson.
All rights
reserved.
Home
Books
Biography
Reviews
Appearances
Workshops &
Resume Contact
Recognition & Service Poems
Articles
Links
Order
Books
Web Designer: Linda Annas
Ferguson