Gregory Lawless
From wreckage, from scree
and debris. From slash
and flannel, from sweet
hay, from cane. With tresses
of vetch, with heifer
bones, with pins of thistle.
I joint the legs. I stake a wild
gourd and hang two keys
there from little nails. See,
they flutter in a gust, twirl
in a blast, a gale. She’s wearing
my dress you say, she
has my mouth. She’s growing
straight from a pile of shale.
Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has published in Contrary, La Petite Zine, nth position, Stride, and Best of the Net 2007, and has poems forthcoming in Blood Orange Review, Drunken Boat, H_NGM_N, and Memorious. He teaches literature and writing at Suffolk University in Boston.
I grew up in a small suburban town in Pennsylvania where, for the most part, I was spared adventure. To kill time, I walked around; eventually, I drove around; but I always looked around, because there was so little doing to do. Besides, it was a picturesque place and therefore worth watching. As a result, I spent plenty of dusk and evening hours sitting, smoking and talking with my friends on the front porch of my childhood house. When my parents moved six years ago, my friend Rob and I briefly considered dismantling, then reconstructing and affixing the front porch to my parent’s new house. We would play the part of British archeologists sawing away in the desert to save the gold panels of Egyptian crypts–a sacred mission of sorts. The porch overlooked my mother’s flower garden: morning glories, cone flowers, bleeding hearts. There was a wasp nest in the corner. A pine tree crowded the steps. What else? We couldn’t imagine leaving it behind, but we did.