This is a poem by Lois Marie Harrod.
I love the way photographs let us float,
the boy in Arthur Leipzig’s Street Games
who lilts five inches above ground
in that split-second he dodged the ball.
I love his elevation like a host as others watch—
the boy in the t-shirt with something cocky
in his twelve-year-old stance, and the boy resting
against the stone railing of the tenement steps, bored,
as we often are when we see miracles of this sort,
and the woman, dressed as my grandmother
stockings and those black-heeled oxfords
I thought so ugly when I was a child. She wears a hat, of course.
She’s waiting for someone, I suppose, to pick up her up,
float her off from where she seems forever grounded.
Lois Marie Harrod’s 17th collection Woman is forthcoming from Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey. Link to her online work is found on www.loismarieharrod.org.
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