On the Cusp of Tomorrow
New Orleans
We lie in bed snug as milkweed pods
in our soft cocoon. Sweet olive scent
pours through the windows. Outside,
firecrackers whistle and bang. Inside,
the full moon pours ivory light over
our century-old floorboards, and though
we can’t hear them, the cockroaches have
begun their nightly strut cruising
the countertops in search of crumbs.
We should be in the Quarter dancing
with the volleyball gang, singing off-key,
keeping an eye out for Sean O’Shaughnessy
who usually veers into the jasmine shrubs
by this hour to sleep off too many ouzos
from the Greek Decatur Street bar. Instead,
we lie whispering to each other like children
sent to bed for a prank. As the tugboat’s
eye illuminates our room, the clock’s hands
move closer. At a minute to twelve,
the deaf couple next door flicks their yellow
porch lights on and off, on and off, a silent
celebration of our country’s birthday.
As tugboat horns bellow, the St. Claude Drawbridge
clangs, and rockets flare over the Mississippi,
I see your beard, the coils of your hair,
your eyes intense as you climb on top of me.
Neither of us senses yet that our daughter waits
just beyond the bend, treading water
in the weedy sloughs, about to push
off into her one and only life.
- Doris Lynch
Doris Jean Lynch has recent work in Tipton Poetry Review, Stormwash: Environmental Poems (Vols. 1 and 2), Contemporary Haibun Online, and Modern Haiku, with work forthcoming in I-70 Review. Her book of poems is Swimming to Alaska (Bottom Dog Press, 2023) and her first collection of haibun Meteor Hound was published that same year. She has won awards from the Poetry Society of America, Indiana Arts Council, Haiku Society of America, the Alaskan Council on the Arts, and Chester H. Jones Foundation, among others. She spent six years in Alaska, including one year in the Inupiat village of Kivalina above the Arctic Circle.