blue skies poetry

I remember the cold floor of your mother’s basement
the itch of a wool couch, but only for a moment
before the present takes my hand, brings me back
to bills to be paid, the dog to be walked,
Valentines to be purchased for a daughter’s grade four class,
with all its budding romance and sugar coated
frissons stapled to foil hearts.

Would I know you, now, were we to pull up
beside each other at a stop light?
The burning red, waiting for the green of go
while a glance of your dirty blonde hair shakes
its way out moss-blue eyes
as we press towards a somewhere else.

There is none of that recognition anymore
none of that jump in the chest for one so far gone.

I remember the way your hands looked
by the light of the television,
the way your fingers might look today
resting on a wheel at the intersection of 5th and 33rd.

~ Micheline Maylor

Micheline Maylor became a graduate of the May Studio at the Banff Centre in 2010. She teaches creative writing and English at Mount Royal University in Calgary and is the editor of Freefall Magazine. Her latest collection “Whirr and Click” is due with Frontenac House in Spring of 2013.

You can read more of Micheline’s poetry here

Filed under: Micheline Maylor, Poems by, RE:ACT Art & Community Together - Calgary Poetry Project by editor Date 11 December, 2012