Susan Grimm
Butterick
The best thing about curfew is breaking the law. The day
a dim envelope as you jump in the car. The girls who sleep
in a bra or always wear hose. Nowhere to go, that’s the trouble.
Rolling down the hill by taking off the brake. Stop
with the slams and whispers. The peter pan collars all face
the same way. Simplicity patterns bloomed from our machines.
Or Butterick. Seamless as our beauty because we misguided
the thread or it broke or snarled. Everything pinned, sharp
as teeth, and the paper see-through. The same chair and the same
door and the night outside over the long green lawns. All around
hard work and duty like lifelines or hymns without words. Parked
as if we were a car in a very safe place, the engine shuddering.
We were busy piercing our ears, deconstructing our underclothes.
You stepped over sleeping bags into the dawn, your engineered
(wedding) curls wrapped like a loaf of bread. On the edge
of the lawn, before the blackberries, the secret path to the ravine.
Shale. Rock broken like pie crust. Layers slipping like a tower
of plates. Topple, stipple, grapple, grab. Dressed all in white
with daisies. Really. The house left empty of all but dust.
Laborious
Driving to Hoboken in winter (talk about a word that’s difficult to rhyme). It wasn’t an omen
that it snowed. It wasn’t an omen when we saw the burning truck which had slid off
the road. Billboard. Difficult journey. Two birds gesturing like a pair of gloves. The shape
of K was being cut out of our lives. Her mattress and small tables and weighty piles
of clothes on their hangers stacked in the white van that caused B so many problems
in a parking lot with the police post-9-11. Snow shifted onto the ground like a yuletide
bakeshop scene. Fog. If I’d known the names of the trees. Robert Frost lets them ghost
as a wood, an obstacle to clear choice. I like his repetition of I. And I--/ I took the one
less traveled by but wonder about that either/or when he could have stepped down,
slipped between, ridden the rest of the way bareback. Sometimes you need an axe.
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, and Field. She has had two chapbooks published. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
