Naomi Stenberg
Jones Street
You once lived with a woman amused by mimes and a man who was half coyote. You all lived in a house, a group home, on Jones Street in Seattle. In the Fall. But only in the Fall. Only one month in the Fall. The leaves on the front lawn blew in until they littered the carpet. The woman amused by mimes said she liked the way they crunched underneath her feet. Like old scabs, she said. She laughed. She laughed a lot. You heard her laughing late at night at the mimes she said were in her television set that she could see only when she turned the volume off. Funny as hell, she said. Marcel Marceau. She talked to you when you both were in the yellow kitchen microwaving mac and cheese or making peanut butter sandwiches. The man who was half coyote drifted by in the hall. He didn’t speak. He wore a gray parka zipped shut with the fur hood always up. Fur around his face. You called him Coyote in your mind because you had to call him something. His brown eyes in the fur parka were afraid and not afraid. He was not interested in you. The few times you met him in the hall, you passed by him silently because you knew somehow to never say hello. It was a year and a half after you had fallen apart in graduate school and three months after you had found the last couch of a friend to drift on to. You moved in with four boxes of clothes and a box of old valentines and Christmas placemats marked Seasonal. You had traveled for a year and a half and were determined to stay. You put red checked contact paper in the drawers in your dresser and lined up your two pairs of shoes, tennis shoes and good shoes, in your closet. I’m going to be okay, you told yourself. I’m going be okay, a recitation, a lullaby, you half believed. For a month in the Fall of your forty-second year. You didn’t know that a corner of the roof of the house was starting to cave in. Even the squirrels couldn’t get purchase. The city condemned the building. You and the woman amused by mimes and the man who was half coyote moved on to other group homes. You never saw them again. I’m going to be okay.
Ice-fishing in Wisconsin
On days like this you try for one sentence
to bead itself together like the long loopy beads
Janis Joplin wore, was famous for.
You try for anything.
Your line goes slack with no fish.
Somehow you’re fishing in Wisconsin,
ice-fishing with a Budweiser in your hand and
a few raucous men that don’t get it
that you’re a poet
and don’t like you either.
On days like this you’re eight again
surrounded by other girls
and you have to open a lumpy birthday present
from your Aunt Lois
even though you know
it’s going to be the terrible underwear
she gives you every year.
You are trying to unwrap one sentence now and
have it not be old-fashioned lacy undies
but something you can actually love.
On days like this you push your pen
like it’s an old ragged mop
and you’re a janitor who has just punched in.
On days like this you know
there will always be days like this.
Naomi Stenberg (she/her) is queer, nuerodivergent and thriving in Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets, Sky Island Journal, Knee Brace Press, Soul Poetry, Teacakes and Tarot, and elsewhere. In her spare time, Naomi collects, on vinyl, female rockers from the eighties, does improv, and runs with her dog.
