Sudden Move
—Carolyn Steinhoff
I want the bird I’m watching
to not be a house sparrow
but a white-throated or a black-chinned;
the family I’m a member of
I want to be loving. Each in their place
in the constellation where I’m safe with them
where I’m safe from them.
If I do as they tell me I’m safe from
having to improvise, the path I’m walking
safe from becoming a river
sweeping my childhood downstream,
duplicities growing into the landscape like baby trees.
Structures grow around an idea,
needlessly, exceptionally intricate,
like a body around a brain.
“Don’t speak.
Get out.
Lie down in this pit.” Contain the mayhem
inside your body,
are the instructions.
Don’t look too old.
The life you long for is illuminated in its entirety
in a lightning flash
before the dark resumes,
the secret trilling like crickets
in the square of green
between the highrises.
Full of surprises.
CAROLYN STEINHOFF is the author of two poetry books: Under the World (2016) and History of the Future (2023) published by Nauset Press. Carolyn’s poems have appeared in Book of Matches, Global Poemic, The Indypendent, Cape Rock, And Then, House Organ, Emerge Literary Journal, The Hat, Conjunctions and many other journals and publications. Her chapbook, Plain English, and her play The Setting Face to Face with the Clear Light, were published by Texture Press. She has had nonfiction articles in numerous magazines including Multicultural Review, A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine, and Today’s Latino Magazine, for which she was a staff writer. She published the paper magazine of art and writing, From Here: Sex, Politics and Power, and was a recipient of the Jingle Feldman Award for Performance from the Tulsa Arts and Humanities Council, grants from the Oklahoma Arts Council, the MidAmerica Arts Alliance and the Puffin Foundation.