August 2021
Mary Ellen Talley
metalley16@gmail.com
Bio Note: I’m a long-time poet and former school-based speech-language pathologist (SLP.) I take many workshop classes via Seattle’s Hugo House and Poets on the Coast. Besides individual poems, I’ve had a Covid-era chapbook, Postcards from the Lilac City, published by Finishing Line Press. Resuming grandmother activities following vaccination is a current enthusiasm.

Pop Rocks Clocks Tick

(note: scorpions are detoxed by removing their stingers)
 
time sizzles
in my mouth
like the crunch
of a detoxed
scorpion
just to show
 
time isn’t chicken
and can force the curious
into bravado

Springtime Sisyphus

after Wallace Stevens
 
One must have a mind
of refracted raindrops
to be hopeful
when the basement bedroom
floods from an outmoded drain
that the plumber’s snake
didn’t cure and later as the carpet dries
in the room with an exterior door
now caulked shut
and sandbagged,
with today’s water rushing
down disjointed gutter pipes
into gray plastic trash cans
as the owner exits to inspect
the last jury-rigged solution
and dump gallons
out over the deck railing
onto the patio
where the splash descends
between stones
into sand,
into the soil and clay
below the water table
that keeps rising.
©2021 Mary Ellen Talley
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL