2 poems by Morgan Harlow

Patterns

Mistaken at first for a burnt-to-within-the-last-centimeter resiny paper

roach left on the table those many long nights before, this morning glory

flower fallen from the arrangement in her grandmother’s heirloom vase

and onto the floral print tablecloth anticipates her own desire for trans-

formation, a longing to be inside the pattern and to visualize as one

watching an avant-garde film the squares, leaf and flower shapes now

larger than a person who, walking around as if in a maze, steps into

dreams as into a change of clothes, recognizes sleep as a place to go to

understand that whoever let the birds into the house had a sudden

kindness for moths as well, to find she has become like Virginia Woolf’s

Mrs. Dalloway in the many beginnings that were not fulfilled but recycled

into life and from there—who could say how or exactly when—eventual

obscurity and death and she finds it interesting this process of losing the

mind as long as she can observe it, the memory of a child standing alone

in the schoolyard under a locust tree while other children play outside at

recess and the next day finding the tree no longer there, remembrance a

glorious and heartbreaking sonata, lit by fireflies leading the way.

Lecture Notes Regarding the Slipperiness of Catharsis

Those mild little shocks we’re exposed to on a daily

basis would, if lined up end to end, shine on like some

Cepheid outpost on the way to measuring eternity.

Instead, as they are singular (compare them to a kind

of movie that captured the mood of the time but no

one watches anymore), they each transpire and then

die, unnoticed and alone.

_______________

Morgan Harlow's work appears or is forthcoming in Ink Sweat & Tears, Folio Literary Journal, Louisiana Literature, North Dakota Quarterly, Sierra Nevada Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and other journals. She teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin and is the author of the poetry collection Midwest Ritual Burning.