American Scene 4

All things are empty and away, and I remember my mother said once, “Life cracks
at your side like the desert floor splitting to intake water. It takes in what it needs
but still remains dry.” So my father, he took up the night sky, responded,
“Fear and envy got us here, does nothing get us out?”

And after, my sister said what she could. “Apply a heavy coating of those words
to my hand.” Then pausing, “We’re so susceptible to other people’s opinions.”
And in the background Savannah, her arm chopping up a dusty sunbeam,
“Dragons, agons, gons … ons … sss …” And I only could hear the cracking.

American Scene 5

Beyond the flashing red light
he almost believed that there was a girl who rested,
alone in her apartment, potential frailty and whiteness.
The birds never flew in much of any direction,
so he sat, stared, and wondered if one day
she would appear, out of nowhere.

Sometimes she sat there for hours
huddled on the small iron wrought table.
She got to reading and the words
piled out onto what was waiting to take them away,
coffee, sugar, wind. It’s possible she stayed until dusk,
flipping pages. Now, she never got a second look,
but it didn’t matter, finally and vainly, however hungry,
she sat in the soundlessness of sound.

And then he’d fall asleep too.
Right there, slumped over, although later
he would consistently deny that at that moment
he was thinking the iron in our bodies was created by stars.

In the distance, she could almost see him.

Later, he lay low in his bed
sweeping the ground for lust, decay, hours.

American Scene 10

In Tennessee, if I could hold the paper thin church that flitters by the highway,
crumble and unroll it like a sheet of mistakes, I could save myself.
Useless and broken clouds, musty purple and negative blue, float,
and I can’t touch them either, slant grace into a nonbeliever.

Disconnected from geography, I find my way by the smell of books instead.
Articles change and harden into hot asphalt. Water simmers.

Trees are nouns. Their sounds are mine. I nose each page.
I smell one day. The radio hums. Bare branches cut up gray sky.

American Scene 12

A deep July was brewing, smoking up through
the dried flowers in our hair, electric blue, red.
Each moment was a wince on a memory,

imperfect. So instead, this time was this place,
and we finally said go, please don’t come back.
We spun with thin sparklers in our grown hands,

not remembering when we got them, how we became
swellings and depressions with no sharp edges.
The smoke turned, a circular fog, the month rising.

Later, we counted raindrops and age faltered.
There was this picture that nobody took,
the smoke dissipating, our hands becoming more,
my face unrecognizable, a dark spot on a dark night.

Sandra Ogle has previously had poems published in The Adirondack Review, The Paumanok Review, Little Brown Poetry, Indiana University's literary journal, and New York University's graduate journal Anamesa, among others. She received her M.A. from N.Y.U. and attended undergraduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor in the publishing industry.