Lavina Blossom

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BIO

Lavina Blossom is a painter and mixed media artist as well as a poet. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including 3Elements Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Paris Review, Poemeleon, and Prompt and Circumstance. She is an Associate Editor of Poetry for Inlandia: a Literary Journey. And she teaches visual art to children and seniors.

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Autumn Visitation

Her eyes are closed, drapes
drawn, yet she can see them. Lifting
their supple legs like
girls in a chorus, they strut along
the fence line, up the narrow lane
to the pole barn and past the few
remaining cattle that her son will sell.

Her head remains on the pillow as the lovely
birds in pink–are they flamingos?–
approach the house, crossing
a blue-white hill made
glass by ice and moon.

She knows the tune
they hum. She heard it
in a storm, an orchestra on the radio
fading in and out. It used
to play beneath the vacuum’s roar,
but quietly, only to her. And, long ago,
in a woody hollow where she
and the man she married
met out of the wind.

No need to struggle up and clean or put
a pot of water on for tea. She
rises, light as atmosphere, floats
out to meet her company
with an “Ah” that plucks
the last stitch-string of a seam
that has held long enough.

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Ticked

Tick of the heating oven? Tick
of a locked and cooling car? Or a child
tapping stick against stick?
As the sound outside my window
changes pitch, speeds and slows,
I realize that although I’ve never
seen that twit either flit into
or out of the tree on which, gripped
fast, it pits a single syllable
against me, bird-brain fits.
Its ditty (dit) drives
sliver-pricks under my skin.

I lower my book, tap
nail tips on the slick hard cover
flat and cool on my thighs, play
needle notes in strict duet.
The minutes pass, I mouth
a plea, and–just that
quick–my partner, without protest,
grants it, quits.

It’s said, “Be careful
what you wish for.” I swish
back a page to follow again
a score of words, rising
and falling bars, but my mind
won’t fix. I lean and lift
one plastic strip of the blinds.
Wind shifts the leaf-screen, opening
holes to blank blue. I whisper,
“Where are you?” while behind me, my
battery-operated clock, as I’ve never
heard it before: all tock.