Claire Keyes

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Adirondack Chair

Claire Keyes

My beloved bathes in the brook, walking naked through the woods while I laze in an Adirondack chair counting white star-blossoms pushing out from raspberry bushes, slapping at black flies taking juicy nips behind my ear, listening to the vireo call over and over again. But nobody answers

just the near-distant chuckle of the brook and a motorcycle churning through the valley, past farmhouses, barns, time slowed down, spreading from present to past, the way it sometimes does so that I feel again a rush of air, a helmet strange on my head. Because I’ve slung my arms around his waist, he doesn’t tell me to grab the sissy bars under the seat.

Destination: north, an old quarry in Rockport, the Harley leaning into the highway’s curves no talking, just the road moving beneath the wheels, the rumble of the pipes, a man’s hands, eyes and feet taking me away. Sometimes we want to be taken away. Sometimes it’s enough to relax on a porch and listen for the hermit thrush, the winter wren, a rooster crowing.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Come September

Claire Keyes

Cars and trucks ascend our dirt road. It’s rough, the driving slow and noisy. Rocks crunch, engines strain. Gun shots in the distance, perhaps a rifle or a shot-gun. Some days it’s just our neighbor with his automatic weapon. He likes to practice on weekends, spraying the cornfield. Soft-nosed alpacas, grazing within their corral, stampede towards the barn as if he were aiming for them, but he has no plan in mind, just the pleasure of firing his gun.

Between blasts, the air is translucent, the only sound the twitter of chickadees, those friendly souls, pursuing hunters through the woods. I’ve seen them perch on a hand if one were proffered. Hunters move along, barely making a peep. Ruffed grouse is their pleasure, groundlings they flush from the underbrush, a flurry of wings and anxious piping. Autumn woods light up for hunters. Accurate, deadly, they fire right back.

Claire Keyes is the author of two books of poetry, The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. Her poems and reviews have appeared recently in Redheaded Stepchild, Mom Egg Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Persimmon Tree, among others. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. Professor Emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Train Country

Liz Dolan

Leaving hard Bronx pavement behind, we sallied across an iron trestle bridge, its girders, a lace mantilla casting shadows over a chorus of arrow-headed pines black against the sky. We chimed in as we descended weedy, wooden steps into Oak Point Yard where, in overalls and denim cap, Dad, a car knocker, ebonized by grease, secured the locomotive’s pistons, bolts, and screws. Later, in the parked caboose, prickly roses hugging her door, we sipped tea next to the pot-bellied stove as Dad devoured roast turkey on whole wheat. When the seven o’clock to Naugatuck screeched like a banshee, we ran to greet her, so close she singed our brows. She snorted smoke, kicked up pebbles, spat rust. That night even honeysuckle was drunk on its own perfume, and we had hope, the kind of hope that flies on silent wings over the lost boys under street lamps coiling rings of smoke up to heaven.

Liz Dolan’s first poetry collection, They Abide,was nominated for The Robert McGovern Prize, Ashland University. Her second, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for a Pushcart, has been published by Cave Moon Press. A nine-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of theWeb, she was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014. She won The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011 and the same prize for fiction, 2015. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.