Scene: Morning
In movies, even a farmhouse is clean, stinkless, the cow fields stripped of shit by low light and filter. No one leaves the room coughing, spills coffee grinds near the basket, sorts socks. And when the middle-aged couple don’t speak in the bedroom, sometimes there’s an image-rush: his hand against a younger thigh, an argument at dinner, an upturned car off the road. Story surfaces when neither speaks. But this morning, you dress for work wordlessly, and I am naked, off-key, under the thin quilt, under the tick of rain, under the whistle and cry of a catbird.
In our dream band, on cello:
Anne Wessel is a retired high school English teacher. Her poetry has been published inThe New Jersey English Journal, Platform Review, The Red Wheelbarrow 16, and Quartet Journal and will appear next year in Pirene’s Fountain, Volume 18, Issue 26. Anne is the program manager for Watershed Literary Events in South Orange, which features quarterly readings by emerging and established New Jersey writers.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 