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SHARK REEF
A Publication of the Lopez Writers
Guild
Vol. 3, No. 1
February 2003
Poems
by Molly Swan-Sheeran
On A Scale
Two girls
in a grocery store
took turns weighing their heads
on a scale.
Giggling, their actions
had the mirror of the morgue,
and though I laughed as I walked by,
shopping for milk,
shopping for bread,
I wept within to see their lives before them
expand, contract, end
and be quantified.
One girl says "Ten pounds"
and, yes, ten pounds upon her nightly pillow rests.
One girl says "Nine" uncertain if that is better or worse.
I'm shopping for breath,
I'm shopping for viscera.
Later I pass them on my way
to the heads of lettuce
which are too dear, and I turn aside.
Copyright © 2002 by Molly Swan-Sheeran
I Am A Temporary Life Form
I am a temporary life form
Here on the third place out
I try to keep fed and to keep warm.
I wander, in a slurry of self-doubt
And self-love, and laughter, and stink
From clue to vague clue what about.
I climb and I fall and am round, pink
And hairy and starry and sore,
Staring up at the heavens that nod/wink.
What else could I do as a brain chore
In my own slip-shod eye of the storm?
Entertaining the gods. Only bores bore.
I am a temporary life form
Here on the third place out
I try to keep fed and to keep warm.
Copyright © 2002 by Molly Swan-Sheeran
Molly Swan-Sheeran,
who makes her living as a metal smith, has been writing poetry
for more than 35 years. She has also written a book about designing
paper-cut Celtic knots. She and her husband live on a small sailboat
and only recently installed a telephone.
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© 2003 Lopez Writers Guild
Made on a Mac by
Leta Currie Marshall