Sarah Bishop is a sentence,
but it is unfinished.
There is no end to it yet.

Is she a simple sentence?
No!
Not usually.
It depends on how green the grass is
and what mom has made for dinner.

The subjects of her sentence are as follows:
feet, hair, freshly-baked bread, and pea pods
from a garden.
And, of course,

Sarah Bishop.

The verbs in her sentence include
dancing, skipping, and flower-smelling.

Who is the author of this sentence?
Someone who likes to fall asleep under trees
and hold water, cupped in
pruned fingers.

Please locate the object of this sentence.
In the meantime, help yourself to a
raspberry.

(Type in “Robert Frost”)


Whose woods these are, I have no clue.
I should be in Kalamazoo;
I made a left instead of right
And saw Costco and a J. Crew.

My GPS must think it strange
That my cell phone is out of range.
I’m already late but I don’t care;
Once again, my plans will change.

I know that I’ve made a mistake.
I’ve passed two Sears, a Steak-n-Shake,
three Wal-Marts, and a Lowe’s or two,
A small bread shop that smelled of cake.

I drive and drive in my red Jeep.
I pass a farm and start to weep.
The only things I see are sheep.
The only things I see are sheep.

She uses eyeliner to coat the
mistakes and wrinkles on her heavy lids.
Smelling of cheap wine and corn chips,
she roams the streets braless,
searching.
But braless works for her,
and so do eyeliner and corn chips.
And under the yellow pitcher of light
from the street lamps,
she is illuminated.
Her wrinkles dissolve like sugar in tea.
Snarled, piled hair becomes a frosted up-do.
Eyelashes long and curled.
A beauty mark on her left cheek.

A sprinkles the ashes while B kneels to God.
C is crying, D is remembering when
E F(ell) down the stairs and called G to
drive to the hospital.
For H’s gravestone, I think that it was
J who Karved the words
Lovely Man.
N had arranged the flowers before O even left
to identify P’s body.
Q will not be missed by anyone.
R asked S,
“when will we die?”
he had no response.
T over-heard and responded,
“we’ve told U before
and you know”.
V pulls another tissue from the box
as W pats his shoulder in false comfort.
X knows that it is indeed
Y who killed Z,
                so he ignores and looks at A,
                still sprinkling ashes.

My cat crouches on the windowsill,
chattering at the mourning doves
who cannot hear him.

The sun is coming up
and melts the crust of dew on the grass.
I don’t care about that.

I’m sitting on the floor, sipping tea
in a teal sweatshirt. It has pink and white
splotches, painted by my aunt in 1985.

How is this real?
The vase of lilies, the browning banana,
the silence of the doves outside.

Her hair rested on her back in a silk shift
as she balanced on the arm of the recliner.
She sat on her perch. Her dress wrinkled with time.
The radio was always on nowadays-
the names played, but they’d turned into
the hum of a thousand worker bees.
The faint spring breeze skidded in and out of the open window
and rippled the yellow ribbon,
tied in a careful bow around the tree in the front yard.
His dog tag swung in the breeze from the curtain rod.
The light caught it and released it over and over
like a trapped swordfish.
A crow flew in the open window and hopped on the sill-
a three-dimensional, feathered
oil spill in the living room.
The sunlight split its blackness
into a display of emeralds and amethysts.
The crow set its astute eye on the glinting dog tag,
took the thing in its beak,
and glided out the window with a flourish.
She watched it leave.
She went to the kitchen drawer,
withdrew a pair of scissors,
and went outside.
The yellow ribbon, now severed in two,
fell to the grass with a flutter.

Two ends- soft petals
roots with small fingers, grasping
we walk on two feet
you have two hands, ten toes
to dig into the garden.