Anticipation

artwork: ralph murre

Anticipation

by Ellaraine Lockie

I like the not knowing

The span of time

that suspends in exquisite tension

When possibilities are endless

and optimism animates ambition

without ignorance deceived as denial

I like the not knowing

The span of time

after submissions are sent

And suspense is delivered

daily by the mailman

Dreams of literary immortality

that stay alive in his empty hands

I like the not knowing

The span of time

since failing the mammogram exam

When statistics leave space for faith

Between fresh appreciation  

for perfectly balanced breasts

And the scalpel that slices

symmetry into grave reality

I like the not knowing

The span of time

where you live luminous in my mind

Wishful thinking and what ifs

with fairy tale endings

Before facts dim the delusion

or convention devours us

I like that span of time

The not knowing

~ previously published in California Quarterly

Godot Goes to Montana

photo: ralph murre

Godot Goes to Montana

by Ellaraine Lockie

My farmer father waited to see

if crops would hail out or dry up

If coyotes would tunnel the chicken coops

If the price of grain would keep

me out of used clothes

If the bank would waive foreclosure

for another year

After hay baling and breech delivering

from sunrise to body’s fall

He slept in front of the evening news

Too worn out to watch the world squirm

Too weary to hear warnings from ghost brothers

who were slain by beef, bacon and stress

Too spent to move into the next day

when he couldn’t afford to forget

how Brew Wilcox lost his left arm to an auger

How the mayor’s son suffocated in a silo

Too responsible to remember the bleak option

my grandfather chose for the rope

hanging over the barn rafters

Never too lonely because every farmer

had a neighbor to bullshit with

To share an early a.m. pot of Folger’s

To eat fresh sourdough doughnuts

To chew the fat of their existence

~ previously published in SLAB

   (University of Slippery Rock)

Sister of Narcissus

from a photo by sienna brown

Sister of Narcissus

by Ellaraine Lockie

          After Echo and Narcissus in Greek Mythology

As she freed water from the bathtub

there clinked six times a knock of metal

She rose, wrapped a towel around her

and looked through the peephole

in the hotel room door

Seeing nothing she said Who's there

Who's there repeated a voice

heavy with the weight of an octave

Show yourself so I may decide she said

The deep echo in the hall said the same

She, having little interest in imitation

and being a modern woman wet with desire

opened the door and dropped the towel

He being an age-old fool of a man

stepped from the wall in a pool of drool 

She smacked him in the face with the door

Retired to her king-sized waterbed

Listened to a litany of rejected voices

And laughed

~ first published in Shakespeare’s Monkey Review

Lost Legacy

photo: ellaraine lockie

Lost Legacy

by Ellaraine Lockie

Houses a hundred years old

with Alzheimer's

Abandoned in isolation wards

on western prairies

Where homesteads were settled

on small town sanity brinks

Mine long ago lost

to profit margins

on a minimal Montana farm

Hospice where I come to heal

from city assaults

My heart heavier

than the hard timber

turned driftwood soft

Decayed gray matter

that once supported ancestors

Who spun stories

about pet horses in the parlor

and vigilantes in the family tree

Our only valuable heirlooms

Tales vanished

through windows without panes

Into snow silent waste

Recycled in spring's

meadowlark music

John Deere's perennial plantings

And in sage scented memories

When orphaned cottontails

came home with little girls

Who grew up and come home

for foster care from a past

fading into oblivion

Where fragments of facts

atrophy into fiction

In the waste away

of what once was

~ first published in Arizona Literary Magazine