Sybil, and: Then, Fall
Rent from DeepDyve- Sybil, and: Then, Fall
Sybil for my mother
When things decompose,it is hard to fathomhow far they fallfrom beauty.
A bed of leavesonce red and gold;the dark muck wherethe body endsillegible.
If some god left you here to rotand to endure, I’d findwhatever slop lieswhere your tongue should hangand ask my fate. I’d stare
at that brute lessonthat he made of youand ask and wait and hope. [End Page 154]
Then, Fall
Sunlight scalds the windowsof a toy store. Behind the glass,a mother argues mutely with her son.
Two passing men in pressed, steel suitsrecoil at a sudden windand notice one another.
Some of the leaves let go.
The door opens and the mother breathesdeep out of the weather, and her angerfalls apart around her child,
whose two small handsclutch a crisp brown boxin a flurry of plum red. [End Page 155]
John Lundberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University who holds an mfa from the University of Virginia. He writes a weekly poetry column for the Huffington Post. His poetry publication credits include Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and New England Review, among others.
