Jacqueline Coleman-Fried – Sparks of Calliope

Red-Gold Dog

I shouldn’t say so, but most dogs disgust me.

Like the one who ran after my wheels as I tried
to balance on my first bike, or the
one who dumped
a pile near my mother’s rose bushes.

Their glassy eyes—glued to their owners or vacant—
are rivaled only by their too-pink, too-long
tongues, forever hanging out.

Some are like Steiff toys you could give
a baby, some are beasts who’d gash your face
for power walking.

Guess who picks up their shit?

Lately, I’m adjusting my opinion. Today,
when I walked through town, the afternoon
sun glinted off a red-gold dog trotting
with her human, each paw moving lightly,
like a dancer.

I was enchanted.

From across the street, the dog
seemed to feel the warm beam
of my admiration. Her intent
expression, lean torso tugged
her owner to where I stood.

She sniffed my aura, I stroked her back.
Listening hard as I praised her beauty,
she looked into my face. Her owner
had to drag the dog away.

Seasons Like Frankenstein

Night is stealing afternoon, but brown
and yellow leaves hang on. They no longer know
when to let go.

Snow is a fairy tale we forgot.
Parched trees, weak from insects
winter once wiped away,
crack and fall into the river.

Where is the lamb of spring, where?
Raw March, April and May took
a knife to it. We wind mufflers around
our necks to staunch the blood.

The bikinis of July—don’t look for them!
They’ve run indoors to escape
a furnace. People without air conditioning—
the poor and old—die.

Under an orange moon, witchy storms
flood homes, rot corn and tomatoes
heavy in the fields.
The electric grid stutters.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in Sparks of Calliope, The Orchards Poetry Journal, pacificREVIEW, Topical Poetry, Quartet Journal, and soon, Consequence and HerWords magazines.

The Old Woman and the Little Girl

It hurt to look at the wreck of her—
legs dangling from a wheelchair,
torqued back listing,
brain, lungs, tongue mostly mute.
Gullet sphincter too tight for meat,
the other too loose.
Yet when family came to visit,
my mother’s smile lit the room.

And, somehow, she made it clear
who she wanted to sit by—
her great-granddaughter, Ella.

Who wouldn’t want to sit beside
those bright eyes and munchkin voice? Ella,
from zero to four—a respite
from the pains of age, a trip
to the land of lambs and princesses.
I often worried—
was she scared sitting next to
this wordless, withered crone
whose very body sent
a dark message?

A few years later, when I ask Ella
if she remembers her great-grandparents,
she looks at the floor, and says,
in a voice lined with tears—

I remember Grandma.

How lovely.
How lovely.

The Box

It starts with a box—
a quilted box—
that sat, for years, on a shelf in the front hall closet
in my parents’ house

holding a white cashmere scarf, white knit hat,
thick mittens and gloves.

Frayed but still shielding from insects and dust,
the box reminds me how my mother wrapped us
in soft words, with gentle fingertips—
but, at the slightest scent of danger,
grew fierce claws.

My sister-in-law earmarks the box,
and its contents, for trash
now that my parents are gone.

I take home the white scarf and hat.
When my mother wore them, she looked
like an angel.

I could not save her
from the blizzard’s mounting snow.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet and essayist living in Tuckahoe, NY. She has taken a weekly poetry workshop at The Writing Institute of Sarah Lawrence College for the past three years. Her work has been published in Home Planet New Online, The Voices Project Poetry Library, Art Times Journal, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, plans to publish another of her poems in October 2021.

Tag: Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

Two Poems by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried