Can’t Dance; Too Wet to Plow
Sheila Squillante
Late April. Shards of light explode
against a rolled fist. The weather,
angry as always, never settled
and won’t settle now for a early night in
with cats and popcorn and an easy movie —
something mindless or exacting,
tall ships and waves, waves.
Doesn’t matter. Seen all the movies
usually associated with violence
like this. It’s not really
violence anyway, but a kind of long sigh,
a deep body feeling that says,
irretrievable.
Like the man said.
Good girl. You can’t go out in this.
The chill air, the shaking
wind. Everything displayed,
open
there, brutishly,
on the lowest branch,
the one no longer sweeping the bare ground.
From Beautiful Nerve
Available directly from the author
Published by Tiny Hardcore Press
Sheila Squillante is the author of the poetry collection Beautiful Nerve and several chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in places like Thrush, Phoebe, Typo, Brevity, the Rumpus, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she also edits the Fourth River literary journal. From her dining room table she serves as blog editor for Barrelhouse.
