Susan Sonde, a finalist in Narrative’s Sixth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of Inland Is Parenthetical and In the Longboats with Others, winner of the Capricorn Book Award. Other prizes include the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Beulah Rose Poetry Prize. Sonde has held teaching positions at the University of Maryland and the Writer’s Center, and lives in Odenton, Maryland.

Kinesis with Garden Implements

by Susan Sonde

Shallow the trough of words between us, the grammar of inchoate
usage. I am here and you aren’t saying much. Be complicit with me,
inhabit my wherefore so apprehensive.

I shovel from the blanket on my cot and angle my head away from
the corrugated wall of the shed, widen my eyes to the broken rake,
to the tea on the oilcloth and the visitation of flies to its sticky
sweetness no longer frothing the pitcher.
People on couch
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