Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week segment features Madeline Simms.
Simms lives in Galesburg, Illinois. She’s a community outreach coordinator for the Galesburg Civic Art Center. Today she writes about the upcoming colder months in her poem “Shed.”
Snakeskin in the snow,
there is no order
to shedding weather
alongside city drips,
run off
under the train tracks. Even in the thick
of winter, there is movement:
the expulsion and expansion
within skin without
the body. Buried
like a hollow, domestic
creak, the space
for sound
becomes for growth
and so we say,
floorboard, door hinge.
There is seldom a voice
for what is cultivated beyond
an imperfect threshold:
field mice inside the shed
alongside the rest of the forgotten,
boiling over: the
Fisher-Price kitchen-set
fading from small hands
hard at work and years
in the sun. Gnawed cotton,
a spokeless bike tire
like a melted utensil left on the stove-top too
long.
To know the shed before
like I know this after: peeling,
burdenless and breathing.
The coat slumped on the floor, sock balled up
inside a fitted sheet
a knot in long hair —all
irrevocable after movement
comes before something again:
matched and smooth, breaching
temporal. A pine tree year-round. Pickled
green beans, canned
tomato juice from hands long gone
all this lack and potential
on one bowed shelf alone.
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.