TWO POEMS

By Pat Anthony

Between Two Cities on a Greyhound Bus

Between Two Cities on a Greyhound Bus

I get homesick

recall the nightmare

bunched covers rolled against the wall

around a body I’d never seen

before that sent me gathering

baby Nellie

with a finger

to my lips running,

running on tiptoe down

the broken stairs,

past the bug eyed goat

into the ash woods

and onto this bus by myself

I keep smelling my grandmother’s third floor

walkup: ham and mayo

browning lettuce lingering

in the kitchen long after

we’d flushed the tomato

cores

An eight-at-night sun burns

through the bug spattered windshield

and I move outside

myself

hang suspended

above the western confluence

of the roiling Missouri

the Kansas river

get slammed to earth by smells

again: back yard barbecues

a shade too near

the odor of packinghouses

beneath these viaducts

another bus belching

blue diesel smoke,

and I’m still homesick

for something that’s not

this running

Gene Pools

Pat Anthony writes the backroads, often inspired by soil and those that work it. Using land as lens she mines characters, relationships and herself as a means to heal and survive living with bi-polar and anxiety disorders. A longtime educator, she holds an MA in Humanities Literature, Cal State, among others, poems daily, edits furiously and scrabbles for honesty no matter the cost. She has work published or forthcoming in Quail Bell, Tipton Poetry Review, Orchard Street Press, Red Wolf Journal, The Blue Nib and others. She blogs her poems at middlecreekcurrents.com.