This entry is part of Getaway Reads, a weekly e-mail series curated by Stephanie Cawley that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.
Doorknobs
by Lois Marie Harrod
Someday one will turn and slip—hot and heavy
from your hand and you will hear
its twin clunk on the other side of the bedroom
and there will be the door between the two of you,
as it has been, apparently, before
you noticed
and you will wish, since you are the wishing sort
that you had the skill, mechanical or social,
to slip knobs, grease locks.
You haven’t been drinking, so it isn’t the gin
that keeps you from sliding the spindle
back
through the spindle hub.
It’s ignorance–you don’t even know the rod
in your hand is called a spindle.
Stupid you, mistaking a cell phone
for a doorknob.
You don’t understand what you have done
until the fireman bashes the door down
and then what to say?
How could you have guessed
your whole house was burning?
Love, the English Teacher
(after Lawrence Lieberman)
by Lois Marie Harrod
Love, the English teacher, grades the snow.
She checks the drifts. From her gray pencils
drop white sheets. They bury themselves like leaves.
Whatever rots, worms itself into another tract,
Prefixes become roots, suffixes mend
the broken reed. I write a story
That lacks a theme, the plot’s a thistle.
Love hates incoherence, the comma sighs.
How can I end what he cannot continue?
Once he promised that he would write.
The oak trees are turning red, the dog
has swallowed my composition, but Love says,
that’s no excuse. She scores the fleece, she scores
the stone: everything I write I write alone.
© Lois Marie Harrod. “Doorknobs” originally published in Ninth Letter, 2013, and reprinted in Verse Daily. “Love, the English Teacher” originally published in Brief Term, Black Buzzard Press, 2011, and reprinted in Verse Daily.
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Lois Marie Harrod‘s thirteenth book, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis, was published by WordTech in March 2013. She won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize 2012 (Poems & Plays) with her manuscript The Only Is. Her eleventh book, Brief Term, published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), features poems about teaching, and her chapbook, Cosmogony, won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Over 500 of her poems have been published online and in print journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet, former high school teacher and Princeton University Distinguished Secondary Teacher, she now teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read some of Lois’s poems on her blog.
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Want to study with Lois Marie Harrod? At the 2014 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Lois will be leading the Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Click here to find out more.
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Advance your craft and energize your writing at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway. Enjoy challenging and supportive sessions, insightful feedback and an encouraging community. Learn more.