Starting Over
By Susanna Lang
Uzès A pigeon trusts our slender balcony with two eggs though it’s September, and the leaves she stuffed around the fragile shells are dry. A late start for her as it is for us. We step softly, not to startle her as we shift our few things here or there, looking for the corner where a chair would be content to sit, a comfortable space where the buffet can wrap its arms around our plates and forks. She must have thought she’d found a quiet spot, empty until we arrived with our baggage, our foreign speech, a vacuum cleaner. We want her to stay, want to feel her brooding presence on the other side of the glass as she waits for the weeks to pass, for her eggs to stir and crack into loud insistent voices, into need and finally flight.
Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This (Unsolicited Books), appeared in 2023, along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). She was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Rhino Reviews, and The Slowdown.
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