Julie Shavin
Cantos on the Long Way Back Home
From across the scuffed and cracked linoleum
a memory seeks its mind.
Where were we, exactly? Making love, bodiless?
Who drew blood and who caught who in a faint,
who brought the needle, forgoing the flame?
A future advanced to meet us
like a baby for surrendering but kept instead,
then, piecemeal, sundered.
It seems so wrong that tonight
a moth flutters out its life in this dark cell,
unwilling to be saved.
I remember now: our houses of too many rooms.
Someone was always singing.
Bio
Julie K. Shavin hails from the southeastern Bible Belt. She has authored three poetry books, The Snake Will be There Soon, In the Air, Against the Air, and Of Mortality a Music. She is at work on a fourth book tentatively titled An Octave Above the Sea, to be published by Ripple Effect Press, LLC. She has been published in twenty-five or so journals and anthologies, has won several awards –most recently, three— through the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and was a Tupelo Press 30/30 poet December 2013. Her website is www.droppinglikerubies.com and current project is collaborating with spoken word artist Hank Buekema on poetry, music and art.