Two Poems by Robin Michel
The Grand Staircase Railing is Rotted
The frayed red carpet a trip hazard.
Proceed with caution.
Inside the oval office, no light.
The thick coat of grime on bay windows
heavier than drapes.
Drapes now replaced with lace curtains.
On closer inspection, the lace is sticky.
Tatted cobwebs. Dead flies. Busted sills.
Gold sconces above the white mantel
where unlit tallow candles droop, ashamed
of their betrayals.
On the fireplace hearth cold as an icebox,
abandoned poker & tongs.
Ashes scattered like snow.
Two built-in bookcases recessed
in the western wall emptied of books
banned long ago.
Doors warped & splintered,
rusted hinges. One opens out
to what was a rose garden.
Now a concrete slab.
The once stately partners desk,
the Resolute, carved from reclaimed
oak timbers. A gift from former allies.
On its scratched & boogered surface,
plastic sunflowers in a cracked vase.
A blank journal. A broken pencil.
A pen emptied of ink.
Your Breath Moves Like a Bellows in Your Ribcage
After Kimberly Satterfield
Some days, no matter how bright the sun,
the sun’s rays will not ease the chill—as if
tranquil California is transmuting into
Russia’s frozen Siberia.
You read the news until you can’t
Doom scroll until you can’t
Hide under the covers until you can’t
And so you seek refuge in a friend’s poem:
feel how your own breath
moves in your body
like a bellows
in the cage of your ribs
You remember another beloved friend
who died one week before
the 2017 Presidential Inauguration.
How, when you had a stressful situation,
she would put the tea kettle on
and listen to whistles of your rant.
“Breathe in anger,” she counseled.
“Then blow it out.”
Your friend played harmonica and sang.
She knew about breath and how best to use it.
You think about last week’s Emergency Town Hall
where someone said, “What our resistance needs is a song.”
You breathe in, feel your own breath gather fire in your belly.
Note: Italicized lines from “It Takes Only Moments” by Kimberly Satterfield and used with permission.
Robin Michel (she, her, hers) is a former educator, an activist, poet, and writer whose work has appeared in Cloudbank, Gordon Square Review, Boudin, Sport Literate, Twin Bill, Naugatuck River Review, Wordpeace and elsewhere. She is the author of Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press, 2023) and Things Will Be Better in Bountiful (Comstock Review, 2024). She lives, writes, and resists in San Francisco.
Photo Credit: Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash.
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