Fog
-first published in the Nashville Review
How the grey-white high rise
diffuses into grey-white sky, the
metal bones melding into cloud, as
if the hard lines quietly thinned
as the steel expanded into vapor.
How my mother’s body loosens its hold
on earth and daylight, language
and sense. How her hands that rise
and jab at assailants in the blank air
still reach for a tissue, placing the
box back on the table’s edge, tenderly,
how they wipe the rim of the bucket that
contains the retch of her dry
heaves. How her wide eyes in the
bones of her grey face fix themselves
on me as she says my name, her
thin voice wailing “sorry, sorry,
sorry.” How can she know this lament
is my own? How can she reckon that
her eldest daughter, the one she still
remembers, would press her toward the
precipice, already pictures her rising
into mist, seamless like girders, glass,
and sky—grey-white bones vanishing in fog.
Flight Season
-first published in Glassworks Magazine
after “Highway 90,” by Hooker, Flowers, & Griffith
I.
Somewhere in Texas a blackbird
glides across a long
flat highway. Flocks
of bluebonnets purple beneath
its shadow as it recedes, a horizon
of rusting oil wells.
This morning my Dallas cousin
reports her condition—recurrence
of cancer, her son suctions
mucous from her lungs. She celebrates
being home, alive—her voice
shimmering, cadence and trill
of birdsong. I try to muster
lyrics for her tune, picture her
winging into the dark eye of flight.
II.
My children trundle boxes
to apartments, babies to homes
in distant cities. I visit,
stretch the rounded hours
thin and long, lift
the toddler’s hand to trace
my cheekbone, jawline, then
her own. At bath time I towel
water from her skin, repeat:
bath, lake, river, rain.
That night I crouch in the shower,
my lower back wrenched.
My husband rushes upstairs,
reports blackbirds cluttering
the tops of the Japanese maples.
The day creases like paper—
angular birds with folded
wings, forked tails.
III.
My father’s eyes wither
like cut blossoms. Chickadees
pluck seeds from the neighbor’s
feeder, my father blind
to their presence. I watch his world,
his body, shrink—my hands
tending sprightly daylilies,
digging for kindred roots,
tubers in soft loam.
At eighty-seven, he wonders
how many mornings
he must wake and dress.
Across my cornea blackbirds
flit like specksof cobweb,
dart away when I focus.
Annette Sisson’s poems are published in Valparaiso PR, Birmingham PR, Rust+Moth, Lascaux Review, Cider PR, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology, and others. Her first book Small Fish in High Branches was published by Glass Lyre (5/22), and she is finishing her second, Winter Sharp with Apples. Her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and others; in 2023, two have been nominated for The Pushcart and one for Best of the Net.