Flying Island

Peripheral Dream Sequence I have a dream in which my father is the villain.  No, wait, let me start over.  I have a dream in which I am the villain but my father made me,  which makes him the villain too. The dream is like a car crash in my  peripheral vision, a sequence of grinding metal and rubber and flame when he asks me, in a fury, are these your drugs? and I laugh because the drug in question is my own hot blood,  viscous and unforgiving on my hands. My mother storms into my childhood bedroom; she tells me my father isn’t real. Not that he doesn’t exist, but that he’s trying not to. He’s trying to escape his own mess. He’s trying to escape the drug of settling for less, so easily swallowed in your youth which is also my youth which is also this dream sequence in which my father is the villain but I am  too and so is my mother because despite the doped-up rush of licking our wounds over the years, we can’t help but make

Ode to Old Baseball Equipment Walking the neighborhood, I saw an estate sale,  the kind where the closets and attic have been emptied,  everything sorted, then spread onto sawhorse tables  set up on the lawn. There was a favorite chair,  dishes from family dinners, suits long out of style  but saved for one reason or another, probably graduations  or weddings, and some well-worn hand tools  that kept the family’s house in repair, their car running.  And over on the side was a table with old sports equipment,  a golf set with a club or two missing, some fishing tackle,  and a couple of old ball mitts – a Rawlings, the Stan Musial model,  the one with three fingers (good starter glove) and  a catcher’s mitt, also a Rawlings, the Ed Bailey (top-of-the-line),  both oiled and each holding a scuffed, yellowed ball in its pocket  shaped to someone’s liking. And a 32- inch Jackie Robinson,  thick handle for hitting bleeders when jammed inside.  Did the one who set these relics on the lawn, the

Tomato Seedlings When I loosen the tomato plants, each  from the other, their roots are spider silk, the hair of tiny Gods. My hands  are clumsy strangers learning each year how to touch the world, trying not to  squeeze too hard, to pinch a stem or lop a curled leaf. They lie side by side, exude a pungent spirit. As I tuck them into dirt, I breathe in childhood, first love, secluded gardens— so much of this good life floating through air at my fingertips. Nancy Pulley ’s poems have appeared in The Tipton Poetry Journal , the Indiannual , The Flying Island , Arts Indiana Literary Supplement , Passages North , Plainsong , The Sycamore Review , and the Humpback Barn Festival collection. In 1992 she won the Indiana Writer’s Center Poetry Chapbook contest, resulting in the publication of a chapbook, Tremolo of Light .