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Between my front porch and the sidewalk,
I am pulling weeds, dead-heading portulaca
in the cool evening respite of a Rehoboth day.
The early twilight slips down my back
as I crawl like Caliban stroking
the loose dirt slipping through my hands
like black gold collecting at my knees.
I stop.
Before me, coiled in the rhododendron,
a fuzzy, ring-tailed, nocturnal bandit stares at me,
eyeball to eyeball, as though we are toasting
martinis over a linen table cloth in a smoky
wild-life café. But this is my garden patch,
my terra firma, invaded by a thirty-pound
salt-and-pepper bellhop of rabies, distemper,
encephalitis.
A decapitated red breast at his paw.
Breathless, sweating,
I crawl backwards on my haunches
and slowly, very slowly, push
myself up halfway, then all the way,
and walk, still backwards, towards
the sidewalk, towards the edge
of civilization.
A retired English teacher, Liz Dolan is most proud of the alternative school she ran in the Bronx and the seven grandchildren who live around the corner from her. One, David, has Downs Syndrome; he was born while she was grieving the loss of three family members in four months; one, an infant born dead. Now she knows David came to help her heal. She has published poems, memoir, and short stories in such publications as New Delta Review, Nidus, Rattle, Literary Mama, Slow Trains, Small Spiral Notebook, Ginbender, Mudlark, and Red River Review. She has received many grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts and is currently organizing a traveling exhibit of her fellow poets’ poetry throughout southern Delaware.
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