Kelly R. Samuels
​

Me as Penelope Asking: What If We Didn’t Lie
Talking After?
​
What if the night was not extended
by other capable godly hands
and we just rose right after, me
scuttling to wash myself in another
room? What would be lost
without our stories, or not even
our stories, but chit-chat, dreamy
musings? You do well stroking
my hip bone, absently, looking up
at where Vega sits in the Lyra
well beyond the rafters and the roof
this mid-winter while I confess
of minor infractions or call up
some memory thought long
forgotten. You share yours
in a satisfied tone in turn and turn
to hmm and ah. Our bodies cool.
The furnace ticks somewhere
beneath us. To the west the river
still makes its slow way south under ice.

---

Me as Penelope Speaking of the Plows Coming Late

We wake as if they are ships trawling
the ocean floor, scraping clean
what they can gather. Why
I think of whales with their ways
of communication I do not know,
though, nearer, there is the sudden
rounding of corners and what resembles
the banging of copper pots
in distant rooms. You fall back
asleep in a fashion only men
I know of are capable while I lie
worrying over whom I bore years
ago, and how far. This new snow
lights the room almost enough
to read by. Certainly: to see my hands
with their useless gestures.

---

--
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and three chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use, To Marie Antoinette, from and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Court Green. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

​

​
​​