two poems
by Cynthia Atkins
Poem With A Ghost Town
I am the town that everyone left
their ghost in. I am the door that closes
by itself from the faintest trace
of someone’s anger, a wind that
can make a room shake—a thunderclap.
I’ve been captive there. Where we pick the rust
off old cars, and where we kissed
or unzipped in junkyards. Now I drive
with death on the passenger side.
A revenant finishing all my sentences.
The child I was in the backseat listening
to coarse radio static— Up front, grownups
testing the brakes, words flung on their
separate townships, toxic as gasoline.
The Chicago air, bitter cold. My ghosts smelled
like nicotine and Doublemint: The twin girls
on the billboard selling gum, with teeth to smile away
our fear and pain. The car swerved.
We turned three times on the Dan Ryan.
Winter offered its spare room. My dad’s Bonneville
continued as if nothing happened. My blue dress
flew out the car window—I watched it get smaller.
I was the ghost that everyone left their town in.
Mirror, Mirror
“I am a collection of dismantled almosts”--Anne Sexton
There is a parcel of land where everything is true
in reverse. Ribbon-cutting ceremony into the Mayor’s
grave plot, where Nana Ida is a shopper putting on her lipstick,
shade 53, Maui in the Moonlight--Setting sail after the war
of ideas. We’re all headed for nasty weather, or its opposite
like breakfast for dinner. I found a lone diner just off
the grid. In a plate, I saw myself, I saw my mother back home,
tweezing her eye-brows--Nylons behind her drying
into leaves, or grief itself. My cracked lips homesick for a smile
and a familiar meal. The waitress has a run in her stockings,
like confidence in reverse, as when Gus the bartender
at the Ramada Inn held my arms behind my back
and touched my 16 yr. old breasts. I felt my pimples stir
into a hurricane in the town square—that Mayor selling
raffle tickets to the thinnest skin of dignity. The tip jar
wrestled to the floor. With two birds perched, my mom
pulled the tiniest stubborn hairs, as if twigs exhumed from
her brow—Hard triumphs of pain held under the light.
I hear Nana Ida’s worry lines in my ears. I am my mother pulling
out branches, the whole family tree. My face is the universe breaking
off the smallest possibilities—with each shard of self.
Photo of Cynthia Atkins
BIO: Cynthia Atkins (She, Her), is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure, and Still-Life With God, and Duets, a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Cimarron Review, Indianapolis Review, Lily Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, Plume, Seneca Review, and Verse Daily. She earned her MFA from Columbia University. Atkins has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, SWWIM Residency @TheBetsyHotel Writer’s Room, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. More info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com.