Carolyn Martin

Mosaic of a Spring Day in Quarantine

From the mauve armchair in my living room:
a flowering pink quince hosts a hummingbird.
Urgent leaves evict white blooms from the magnolia tree.
A maple’s tight-fisted reds blur the truck
marked Prime, crawling around a UPS delivery.

This: a spot of time witnessed from a space
I rarely occupy. That’s it.

And yet, for no other reason than to keep
me in my seat, the hero in the novel I was reading
last night before I remembered sleep
jogs up our cul-de-sac.

A mortician in this murder mystery,
he claims people trapped in doomed airplanes
may yearn to leave behind notes of love or regret.
How? Swallow them.
The stomach saves, he maintains and pulls
indicting words from a woman’s cavity.

Worth a morning’s wait.
How else would I know the neighbor
to the south is getting a new flat screen;
the one to the north, a box from Vitacost?
How else would I learn that words
– consumed and absorbed – survive?

Blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Her poems have appeared in more than 130 journals and anthologies throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments will be released in 2021. Currently, she is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. Find out more at www.carolynmartinpoet.com.