July Poetry Monday: Cheryl Keeler

JULY POETRY MONDAY: Cheryl Keeler

Cheryl Keeler

Poet Cheryl Keeler lives with her husband and son in a small town in Virginia where, she tells us, she is taken on brisk morning walks by her rescued Jack Russell terrier. Her poems have been published in 5 A.M. and the online journal, Dirty Napkin. An early childhood specialist, she has also published several short-stories for children. Currently, she is firming up a manuscript of breast cancer poems, Six Letters and a Lump, which awaits a publisher. This isn’t the only important thing Cheryl Keeler is doing, however. Since her small town lacked a public library, she started one, which she now manages—always trying to work in a little poetry with her brown bag lunches.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

 

Last Night’s Dream on Being Forty

Where are the keys to the field trip
bus? The children are waiting
I must find the keys—
the children are waiting.

I scratch in the drawers
of my childhood home
in the closet, the pockets—
the children are waiting.

I cram in a car filled with family
father and uncles, infants and ancients.
They hold frozen turkeys, no bus keys—
the children are waiting.

I scatter down stairs. A man
there, my husband, admires me
I want to stay, but he has no keys—
the children are waiting.

The children are waiting!
Fear fingers my throat as
I turn in lost circles—the keys!
The keys! The keys!

I awake to not knowing—
and the children are waiting

 

Licking Clean the Cavities

Sun on new green like stained glass, the glow permeating meadow, mountain, me. Above, a cloth of clear blue, although the paper says clouds and possibly rain. I wake with my husband’s thigh next to mine, drink French-pressed coffee. Plant onions, water tomatoes, push-mow the side yard. The transplanted strawberries look perky; squirrels hopscotch tree to tree. What if I think of my life not by counting one year after next, end-stopping, but as a times table, each minute multiplied by marrow? Eat from fatty tissue, licking clean the cavities and canals of bone. Each minute, larger, more alive, fed by ones before.

 

At His High School Graduation, Menopause

My biology yells out at it; this body
that stitched his, cell by cell, that opened
to spill him into the world, that fattened
him with homemade milk. These

are the arms that refused
to lay him, napping, in the crib
for fear this nose would miss one whiff
of his baby scent. These are the legs

that splayed next his wobbly
ones, that took crooked detours
of bug-looking and puddle-stomping. This
is the uterus no longer useful, that great

stretching sack I wore in surprised
pride. How can it never again swell? How
can these eyes watch him switch the blue

tassel, shake hands with his future?
How can this heart stay seated
while his walks off?