Claudia Gary
Turmoil
It brought you here. Where is your gratitude,
slamming the door like that? Thanks for the ride!
you should have said. Instead, stubborn and rude,
you stomp along the sidewalk lost in pride,
thinking of ways to even out the score.
You rage, fixate, obsess and agonize.
What’s worse, you’re plodding just when you should soar
and raise your head, serene, with open eyes.
It tries to leave without you but you call it
back from its expedition around town
and it obeys. You grab your coat and wallet,
hop in again. The engine’s wearing down
and burning oil. Blue smoke from the exhaust
signals,
Get out, get out, before you’re lost.
Morning, 1956
Beside our sunken living room, my parents
sat at the kitchen table and refilled
their swirled-gray coffee cups, discussing merits
of Eisenhower versus Stevenson,
Kefauver versus Nixon. Static-ridden,
each candidate debate on radio
would chip away the smooth consistency
of our routine. I heard an edge in each
parental voice, until I said, “Why don’t you
both stay home on Election Day?” But soon
my mother introduced me to the metal
machines with turning levers, crisp white labels
printed authoritatively with black
letters. She probably helped elect Ike.
The next day, breakfast time was back to normal:
She would stir half-and-half into her coffee
and Dad would show her why there was no need
to stir it, as the pouring made it blend
and settle, more or less, into a bitter
sweetness that they would sometimes let me taste.
Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of
Humor Me
(2006) and several chapbooks, most recently
Genetic Revisionism, she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is available
online. Her chapbooks are available via the email address at
pw.org/content/claudia_gary.