A Bottle of Summer
There were summers bright with sunlight glancing off chrome
truck bumpers where we’d beg a dime
for a cold Fanta Orange, or a Coke in green glass.
Already rusty on the rim, the cold box held the bottles
in a web of metal, and a crate for
the returns, and we returned them, a penny apiece.
Bottling plants reused them, cleaned, refilled, and capped.
I kept this one—a sculpture made
of molten glass, lettered on its belly in Coca-Cola script—
a souvenir of bottled summer holding
hopes or childhood wishes—but what did we want beyond
a public pool, and green lawns stretched from yard to yard?
We rode bikes. We roller-skated.
We swam in chlorinated water until our hair turned green,
playing games our parents couldn’t play.
We’d get burgers from the Hi-Fi wrapped in waxed paper—
white for plain and yellow for cheese—
when the only brand of paper cup was Dixie, and straws
were wrapped in paper tubes.
We’d shoot them at each other—a pea-shooter that
only worked once.
If you didn’t grow up with soda bottles, would you know
this one was old? Hardly marked by
years—translucent, wavy, fluid before pop-top cans
left sharp hooks
on lake shores and in parking lots soft with the day’s heat.
Days escaped like genies from those bottles, rims puckered in a pout.
Now there is no factory for returns.
I passed that Coca-Cola building—dust-brown and boarded-up—
when Highway 37 ran through town.
It was my route back home, but I never stopped to find
what might still echo there—
the rattle of capless bottles setting all the bubbles free.
Let’s Begin With a Metaphor
A poem, this poem for example, could begin
with a hot house of orchids and accents,
coffee beans, and the smell of fresh-set
concrete, and a harpsichord playing on the wind.
Any minute, it could go wild—it could fly
through spring skies, learn piano—or banjo
if you prefer. It could sail on the crest
of the moon. It will burden no one. It can
focus on a grain of sand and see the universe
there. And it can live in parallel accord.
There is choice involved.
Even if you cannot love what is here
before you, love what has begun. The
world of other countries may seem
far away, and the galaxies even farther—
and perhaps Massachusetts exists only
in an alternate universe, but a poem
can carry you through a nebula of scarlet
and ochre. Can you hear the bookstores
singing, and the birds? Even if your
concentration breaks, it will wait for you.
Climate Change
Perhaps it’s this new weather—fog rising from what was
tule land—reed and duck and mud—now silence unrolling
into gray—a gauzy curtain that obscures one life from another.
This year, we began with a body in the parking lot—a young
man who lost a knife fight. In the school corridors, I weave by
students practicing hand signals or shutting down into darkness.
They are tall. I am invisible.
I do not know if the children of my childhood envisioned
this future of lightning, landslide, and wildfire. Who taught us
how to survive the sudden turns and roadblocks? I know some
did not—but here you can touch the anger—a skintight balloon
thinning beneath a dull blanket. Hallways flood and empty.
Do you wonder where dreams go?
Do they twitch and dissolve like passing clouds? Do they die
bloody on a table, or starve in a back closet? In the halls, only
hurry and skid—language shredded to bare bone, teeth,
and thunder—what do they take home? What do they bring
back? The walls echo with their stark syllables—barbs and steel.
In the news, bomb threats, an outbreak of shootings, lockdowns,
girls beaten with bats, young women taut with suppressed
consonants—no wonder their throats bulge. Even in the new
building with new carpets, bare walls—the permanent Sharpie slur.
We schedule; they ditch. We lock the gates; they jump the fence.
They curse the teachers in a room of growls while we—the invisible—
call home, hand out boredom, take away their hats, their phones,
their voices. We call this education, this stirring of storms.
Nancy Cherry is a North Bay Area poet living in Novato, CA. Former publisher/editor of the Bay Area Poetry Newsletter, Fish Dance, her work has appeared in various journals including Main Street Rag, Nimrod, Poetry Flash, Mid-American Review, Gyroscope and West Marin Review. Her collection, El Verano Burning, was published by Radiolarian Press in 2014, and she has three chapbooks in print. Recently, she was recorded in Berkeley, CA at voetica.com/poets/1001/5 if you would like to hear her voice.
January House Literary Journal 
Leave a reply to Judy Lawshe Cancel reply