Make Believe Seeing a dense spatter painting revealed by my older brother when I was in elementary school was filled with life changing decisions as his invitation was to sit down take time to look at every illusive detail it felt so important I believed what I saw mattered I opened my eyes wider than ever I saw dark colors striking canvas like fists and pleas and storms I saw bursts of dazzling light poking through like sun and berries and bees and when he told me to step back to see the wider view to look for any people that I knew to see what they were doing I saw one yelling at another I saw one leaning on another in a loving way one way of being in the strokes of noticing
Visions The woman in the huge raccoon coat with her face sticking out of the raccoon head, ran toward me in the freezing parking lot with wild desperation in her eyes she grabbed me, wrapped her shaggy coat around me in my silk blouse swaddling me, so close to her I could barely be seen whimpering at me, it's so cold from my enfoldment, with twisted mouth and muffled voice I explained that I didn't want her to forget the psych eval I wrote for her son, I wanted to save her a trip to have to come all the way back for the papers she needed for the psychiatrist appointment but, some warm part of me wanted to say, let's throw the analysis in the river, cancel the appointment take your son out of school and just bring him to your den away from all the red lights flashing so you can keep bathing him in your instincts, keep teaching him how to see all the life-giving colors you so clearly see in the darkness
Legacy You told me that you were the least favored daughter of three who had to wash the floors while the others found their shine out of the house wearing the dresses you ironed you smiled when your mother made you do her bidding so she wouldn't feel bad because you knew that she had been thrown down the stairs from the pedestal of her high hopes by her own mother's pick for her arranged marriage and you were glad to take her in to your new family, with your one daughter, next in line, who spent her very first paycheck buying you a Lladro porcelain sculpture of a serene mother holding a dreaming baby a monument to new beginnings knocked off the shelf by accident by the old woman who had never been allowed to stand whole on her own we three watched the head fall onto the floor, and you and I hugged my grandmother glued the mind back on, stood back realizing that we could all see the line of repair on the little figure a fitting and somehow proud reminder that we were all still looking for belonging and we could put the pieces back together now
*****
Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who was raised in New York City, and is now living in a forest in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Since she has returned to writing poetry this year, her poems have been accepted in a few dozen publications, including Across the Margin, Vita Poetica, Feminine Collective, Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, Military Experience and the Arts, and the Avalon Literary Review, as well as three anthologies.
