Angie Macri
Sandtown
Then they moved to a town of sand
above hills named chapel, Napoleon, and fall. They found
the town by a road visible from the woods
because of the flowers on its sides,
what the people there called blind eyes,
orange as fox and fire
cut into circles. The mile markers
were there as everywhere, emergency personnel
needing the numbers
just in case something happened. So it seemed safe, normal
as a mother’s mirror, and the mother loved the flowers
although she never grew them. She stared hard in the mirror
that summer. The girl couldn’t hear
a voice responding. What is the flower’s real name, she asked her father,
and he looked it up, as always, delighted, poppy, and took it a step farther
as always, past her interest, to the Latin,
papaver dubium, poppy doubtful,
either no one thinking its features very particular
or no one really knowing its origin,
neither of which was very satisfactory.
When the fortuneteller
looked at the ball of glass made from sand,
it seemed full of stars, and she said soon
they would find glory. In the kitchen,
the girl had left crumbs on the counter,
unfortunately the same day her father had spilled the sugar
and didn’t wipe it up, again. But when the fortuneteller
spoke, the girl heard a spoonful of sugar
when no one was looking, and the father,
an instrument out of his price range that brought stars closer.
The poppies had escaped from another land
in this northern county,
having been brought to become part of a garden
but leaving for roadsides through the forest,
loving the sand in sunlight. There was no way to tell her mother
as her mirror filled with hills
of a sanctuary, of a general become emperor, exiled,
whose code was the basis of law,
of fall.
Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past (Finishing Line). Her recent work has appeared in American Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waccamaw. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs. Find her online at angiemacri.wordpress.com.