St. Lucia
On St. Lucia's day when I was twelve I lit
the candles of the table wreath, put it on my head,
and walked upstairs.
I held a
thawed-out muffin, and a cup of coffee on a tray.
What a fright I gave my mother,
coming slowly up her stairs — the candles
hovering at conflicted angles above my head,
and my long old fashioned nightgown
tripping me a little on the way.
How kind she should have noticed, then, and
mentioned, my extraordinary
beauty in that moment.
Before she leapt at me and blew the candles out.
___________________________________________
Johanna Skibsrud
(b. 1980)
her debut book of poems Late Nights With Wild Cowboys
was published in 2008 from Gaspereau Press.
A native of Meadowville, Nova Scotia, she currently lives
in Tucson, Arizona.
The Sentimentalists (fiction)
This Will Be Difficult to Explain, and Other Stories (fiction)
I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (poetry)
Late Nights with Wild Cowboys (poetry)
_____________________________________________
I Had Imagined Them, Unthinkingly
Where do they go in this
part of the world?
I had
imagined them,
unthinkingly, in the
southern part of Florida with
ours, or down as far as
Mexico,
As if all
birds met there, like
heaven.
