You Get a Free Shadow along with Me
- You Get a Free Shadow along with Me
It's scissored out of shoebox cardboard.Dogging my heels it protests I tether it.
Its template is the orchard blurred with smudge pots.It was blossoms, but settled for ticky-tacky.
Alone, it scans the builders' scaffolding. Empty—it's Sunday.How far down would workmen's shade fall on weekdays?
It's free, just a souvenir.The waggy tush-end of being.
When we glance quickly up from our shadow,We try not to faint.
The shape of my mind is an open book—twenty of them.Also a tailormade nimbostratus. Unilluminated area. Interceptor of light.
Your freebie, my promotion:The catkin's comet's shutter. I feel you reach right through it.
SANDRA MCPHERSON has published twenty poetry collections. Her new book, Quicksilver, Cougars, and Quartz, is forthcoming in 2018 from Salmon Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Field, Poetry, the Yale Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, and Plume. She taught for twenty-three years at University of California at Davis and four years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her collection of sixty-seven African American improvisational quilts is housed at the University of California at Davis's Design Department. She is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist.
