Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Morningside

For Josie McElroy

 

In a glimpse of geese,

Something about glory

Crosses the blue-banked sky.

Something about glory

Traces the jet’s cool vapor trails.

 

Winging this blue-banked sky,

Something about time shakes

And stirs until you want to say:

Surprised by sunlight, traceless geese

Slip across our blue-banked day.


A Slice of the Apocalypse

For Hal


You hang at the edge, knee deep in splash,

Fly-fishing a summer of remarkable pools.

 

If overhead, the cosmos unspools, what of it?

It’s between you and Falling Creek,

 

You, knee deep in atmospheric want.

If it is a remarkable summer, you don’t notice,

 

But for the tug and tight race—a rainbow

Fit for two hands, ready to reel.

 

If it is a remarkable summer, wouldn’t the stars have told it

The night before—glowing down summer’s ceiling,

 

Somehow mapped by the Milky Way?

You take time to land the rainbow, while apocalypse

 

Slices the air, and a car crashes through,

Rolls six times while you land it.

 

You unhook the fish—a rainbow of surprise—

As the car slides to rest, and the screaming begins.

 

You find her first, thrown yards from the wreck;

And the little boy, he is crawling out of the broken window.

 

You and a friend guide the driver up the bank,

And he is slapping his bare chest for cigarettes,

 

“I need a cigarette,” he says with alcoholic breath.

The boy cries, but you tell him he’s alright, and the woman is, too,

 

Saved from the half-spun wreck. The story can’t get any better

Than that. They are carried away, and no one in his right mind

 

Would follow them into the future weather where

Apocalypse slices summer, and Heaven’s split belly spills its guts

 

In an abundance of ways, leaving you with a trout, stolen and released;

A hook, cast and recoiled; iridescent catastrophes, lit and dispelled.

A Ph.D. candidate who studies critical reflection and critical reflective writing in Integrative STEM Education at Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Mattie Quesenberry Smith is an English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Her poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies, such as Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics, and Phi Kappa Forum.