Mark Seidl
Polaroid
That it's as much of the sky
as you, in your get-up
of wrong-side Civil War
cap and cowboy boots,
how the sky, the blue
live air, shapes itself
around you and you shape it
to yourself, the way river
and bank collude to inflect—
that's how, when this come out
of the box of things you keep
because you love the ones
who gave them, you will know
that to hold one day apart
from all the rest, to remind
you of a place you were,
wasn't the point, but that I,
for a moment, was looking.
But Ohio
Just saying it lets you down,
that first O a delicious round
of surprise like the mouth
of a girl whose arm you brush
against in the hall between
Spanish and algebra, whose
perfume you inhale through
the conjugations, and who turns
with a hi bright as a cigarette's
burning tip behind the bleachers,
as if you are the one whose
touch she wants against her
lambswool sleeve, and then
that final falling o, her lips
curling to a pout as she sees
it's you, all neck and bedhead,
bent into your slouch
like a pipe-cleaner unglued
from its art-class trial.
Mark Seidl lives in New York's Hudson Valley, where he works as a rare books librarian—the best job in the world! His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Two Hawks Quarterly, Belle Ombre, and Hotel Amerika.