Poems Anna Bower, Student, Furman University
When I Shared a Room with My Sister
face-up in a dead-man’s-float, his dappled down suffocated by the black pillow of a crude foe.
We had this line. It divided the room down the center, or what she said was the center – I did not question my sister. She said Now each of us has a side. Your side, my side. We agreed that sides helped with the keeping of sanity. So we learned to go about our business, careful not to allow anything larger than a pinky toe stray to the other side of that duct tape line. But sometimes when my sister was gone I crept over the boundary, wrapping my body in her green duvet and sighing in knowing the other side still existed. What I did not know, lying there still small, still happy, was that my whole life would be grey lines, boundaries, and the soft tread across them.
When I say “My dad does oil,” not once do they think about my mother’s cold salad fingers; bitter and moist, the remnant of romaine, wringing, twisting, breaking the green-leaf necks, wondering what time it will be tonight. Sonnenizio on a Line from Addonizio We part our lips, our mouths get near and nearer, two curvilinear crescents approaching collide and hoping to unearth some cosmic connection, that one nearly all our friends claim will occur now as we near this moment of nearness, and safely pass the moment before where I fear this nearsighted romance is nothing more than a veneer for convenience: two bodies finding what is nearby and latching onto it, like weary mountaineers clinging to the slope and groping the sediment and brush after a near fall when the peak seemed to sneer from above. Yet as we climb near and nearer, I think I could be your nearest. I could be your nearest, dearest.
Telling People About a Living When I say “My dad does oil,” they see suburbia with its sword-tipped gates, fat men chewing fat cigars, raw umber flakes trapped in their smiles. When I say “My dad does oil,” they imagine a duckling 157