Karen Terrey

Lunch Hour Reading

after Frank O’Hara

It’s my lunch hour, so I go 
into the drizzle that’s the ocean sky 
come down to the streets and if 
I walked on sand this drear 
would be expected but the pavement glints 
from shine through a folded cloud 
instead and a school of pedestrians silvers 
across the intersection when the stick figure 
lights up and the city rises into the grey. 
Dark suits, neon green sneakers, bike cab drivers 
with graffiti-ed helmets, and there on the corner 
of Pike and 6th three Girl Scouts singsong 
and shake blue and brown boxes in the air 
like castanets. I turn right onto 5th 
passing a man who plays half a cymbal, 
an upside-down tin pot and a broken dish 
with a pair of drumsticks. I want to dance
      but no one else does. 
The reading is at Elliot Bay Books 
and the cab driver says in two, three hours 
this place will be a festival. 
The event is ticketed - who knew? 
and sold out. They say it’s all downhill 
to the Brass Pig and I turn right again
onto Pike. A girl leaning against the telephone pole 
calls to me by Broadcast Coffee. Turns out 
she was Gabriel, a boy I crushed on in college. 
In many ways 
I don’t feel any different from who I used to be. 
My mother says at seventy 
she still feels like she did when she was in college - 
and yet who wants to be the same 
as they’ve always been, who doesn’t try 
to change someone else? I walk a long way 
and end up back where I started. 
Like everyone else, my feet once dangled 
from a highchair and walking was a miracle 
that happened high above me. 
I thought living was all about falling 
          and I guess it still is.

---

Vertebrae

All day I think about my father’s spine. 
What uprights him. His scaffolding. 

That secretive warehouse of shelving 
in the first Indiana Jones movie, 

a box of vertebrae we collected 
from the Texas ranch land 

(some dead cow), points of attachment 
where tendon and ligament tether 

sheets of muscle and skin, 
bleached tunnels for ropes 

of nerves, whitened crosses 
next to a hairpin turn, 

the taper of airplane wings, 
a kite tail curling back in the wind 

taut on its cord, how a line 
of poetry is an intersection 

of two planes, the literal 
and the figurative, someone said that 

in a lecture, sliced an X across the board. 
Kandinsky says what lies within 

appears ugly only because unfamiliar. 
My father coughs into the receiver 

and clears his throat. 
Let’s say how one moves through space 

defies the rigidity within. 
A spine of river ice cracks, 

noses up against the bank’s edge, 
folds beneath every night, 

freezes over again. I saw him naked once, 
startled, eyes open. 

He stood in the doorway, 
bone and hair, nail and cartilage, not a father.

---

Saved

The word suggests it is possible. 
Why does my father save a box of bones, some dead cow

we collected years ago in the August heat of Texas? 
A woodpecker hammers its beak into a tree

12,000 times a day without injury, 
its skull protected by spongy cartilage,

and scientists want to design a helmet 
similar and so strong it can save our own heads. 

After the avalanche, 
my friend was buried forty five minutes. 

She could not have been saved.  
A man flips each shoe off and up into his hands, keeps walking 

barefoot through warming grass saved all winter under snow. 
Last night’s rainstorm blew away the winter birds. 

Now summer is in this air hovering 
above the expectant rushing ground. 

I’m listening to this morning’s world that exists without her. 
A carpenter on a tall ladder buzzes an electric sander 

over a window frame, saving the wood from rot. 
The trick is that bone does not attach beak to skull 

as the bird pecks at fifteen miles an hour. The trick 
is that there isn’t a trick. Maybe he saved the box 

because he knew what I didn’t as a child, 
that what we had that day wouldn’t last, 

toeing vertebrae free from the hard dirt with his boot, 
pointing out the fragment of pelvis 

for me to lift, to carry home. We want to rectify the endings. 
The prom corsage saved under its lid 

is the skinny dip at a summer midnight, the girl forever 
bending back against the boy’s arms as if 

night itself was lost to the abandonment of her neck 
and her knowledge that he can’t help but pull her upright again, 

shining with that primal youth that can’t be rescued. 
Years ago 

my father and I spotted a Pileated Woodpecker; 
we studied its stats in the guide book, the soaring dip, the red-tipped crown, 

the mad beak drilling holes in our dead trees. Who knew we’d salvage 
that staccato echo for our own myth? 

Some people plant baby teeth in the garden 
or thread them on a necklace. The wedding dress saved 

in its hermetically sealed box. Kindergarten finger painting. 
Fresh cut flowers dying in their sugared-water vase. 

A braid of hair snipped and pinned to a bulletin board 
like a wreath or a shrunken head. Sometimes an object is too precious – 

Embryos. Sperm. Organs are donated. Eyes. 
Taxidermy. 

At the Bates Motel, Marion opens the old woman’s closet, 
dresses saved on their hangers, turns to see under the bedclothes 

the bird claw hand. A body. 
Saving requires being able to imagine what we can lose. 

Archived letters. Museums. 
Wildlife Refuges. A locked box. 

The string on the finger – what is it for? 
The wedding dress fades. The daughter never marries. 

The key is lost, the necklace of teeth 
left somewhere in a drawer. 

Hush – do you hear the bones, rattling in their box? 
The roots, bracing themselves for spring?

---

Compression Fracture

My childhood was one thing 
and then it was another. 

My father awoke and his seventh vertebrae cracked. 
His spine, 
        a vulnerability he didn’t know 
                    he carried. A turtle shrugs deeper 

into its shell. Water chatters 
down a chain of stones 
                     and pools in the low spots. 

My mother’s heart 
                     doesn’t know how fast or slow 
to beat, what’s for its own good. 

When I imagine the ninety-year-old woman
                     I will be, my bones close in, each joint misaligns, 
even my hair clenches. 

                     These fractures take time. 

Gregory Orr writes that life 
                     is about becoming 
rather than being, verbs rather than nouns. 

Who I am now 
                     is the only place from which I can measure 
my knowing. 

                     Things catch up with us – 
                              in the dank murk of my lungs 
                    a beastchild moans as it shoulders 
 through the silence.                    
                    



 
 
--
Karen Terrey’s poems have appeared in Rhino, Edge, Meadow, WordRiot, Puerto Del Sol, Wicked Alice, Canary, and Grey Sparrow Journal. Terrey’s poetry chapbook Bite and Blood is available from Finishing Line Press. If you’d like to learn more, she blogs at www.karenaterrey.blogspot.com.