by Lisa Hibl
My heart.
A long list-poem thin on calories.
All the noises of the night &
some of the darkness.
Orientals.
Baby Joe.
Mauve filaments.
Cotton candy.
My chance at happiness.
My will to live.
Green toothpicks,
napkins & plates.
Air-tight placentas.
The names of things &
entire species.
Real estate.
Jet trails.
The newest projects, the experiments,
the instructions.
The Father’s Day rose, the ICU,
the very smoothness of the path.
Quietude.
Relief.
A continent.
The meadow captive, cousin to Susan
but furrier, in a green jumpsuit.
Parched leaf & wet stem &
possibly, the solstice.
***
photo credit: Scott Carroll, Unsplash
Lisa Hibl directs the Russell Scholars program at the University of Southern Maine, a small living-learning community that promotes a sense of belonging through connection to place. Her poems have appeared in Writing the Land: Maine, the Black Fly Review, Puckerbrush Review, California Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Untidy Candles: A Maine Poetry Anthology, and the Spoon River Anthology. She was a semifinalist for the 2023 Terry Tempest Williams Prize at North American Review. Her recent work appears farther afield, in The Goose, a Canadian journal, and Speculative Nature: An Anthology, published by Guillemot Press, UK. She lives in Woolwich, Maine, where she maintains a perennial garden on the edge of a salt marsh.