Trespasser
I am listening
to the sound of the stove
heating up
and butter coating
the thin
strings of the air
at night
in my kitchen.
when it feels
like EYES
make a panopticon
around me.
strange numbers
on the clock
for forbidding
my place in
the silence. I am
compelled
to put my hand
on the griddle.
to touch
what I am not
allowed.
MEREDITH WATTLE
is a 2021 graduate of UB's Sociology department. She is planning to go to law school in Fall 2022 for public interest law. Hopefully, that works out.
Early morning rooms of late february
i see the trees rooted in ice
while the forest is thawed, is growing again
widening the membrane.
all dripping though the sound of sleeping birds is the sound of growing.
the deep hard silence of gone grass below
roughlike the smoky glass trees move in the kaleidoscope taking
its time.
the house is a hall under the floating
mountain grey. the house is milky linoleum and vapor
in the still bubble. in the early morning rooms of late
february is the guest
stayed too long and sleeping on the wanting
of every little thing waiting there.
all vulnerable to the soaking chill
to rise.
Landlocked
Never been to a real big island,
the proper ocean-type,
without a toll bridge. How far
does the sound of ocean waves go, on a windy day
on a still-air day? How many miles until
even the white noise of it becomes clear?
Or does it ever even go-
the crashes of it informing how the distant oak-leaf trembles.
I am a long way, on a bench, in Gasport,
and the sky is very gray.
I am looking at the boot-prints of Park Service
in the mud instead of sand.
How far away the ocean is- but I am on the island
of the continent. I am on the big-island of the Western Hemisphere,
on the medium-island of the park,
while my little dog snaps at the gnats that dare come near.
I think that I have already been there.
I think that in the noise of far away semi-trucks,
I can hear the ocean.