Half

Today bisects the year
though we keep our promises
delayed. My sister says,
With each tear, you'll surely dehydrate
yourself. And sawed in two, I ask
if worms have hearts. You, unhealing,
born with hands of
truckers. The sound of ships
breaking is what you wait for

*

I'm no longer sweet
enough, you shout to the circling
mosquito. You don't even
say goodbye to the lying
insomniac. What buckles
isn't the horizon as a child's
hand unlatches.
So many mutinies over
the past week. Then a pitbull bursts
tragically onto the scene.

**

Esther Lee's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Ploughshares, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Runes, New Orleans Review, Eleven Eleven, Columbia Poetry Review and other journals. Her manuscript of poems was selected as a "Discovery"/The Nation Award semi-finalist and finalist for the Pleiades Press Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. A former editor of Indiana Review, she now teaches in San Francisco at New College of California's Writing and Consciousness Program.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/leee_poems.htm