A Pair of Gloves
by Rebecca Hart Olander
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
Ross Gay, from “Sorrow Is Not My Name”
Is there a more perfect way to reconcile than this?
To claim the season in one’s body, to be the green?
It’s always been my favorite color, because of the envy,
the Emerald City, the coniferous. Because of moss
and my uncle’s one eye turning now to match his father’s.
It’s dollar bills balled in the base of a guitar case
just outside the Red Line, unripe fruit, the ocean
caught in tide pools. It’s the hoop for sinking long shots,
the thing to shoot for, the action of emerging from earth.
It comes in curls of fat tulip leaves clearing the ground,
thin crocus stems bending beneath purple crowns.
The ease of shoulders, the shock of delight, the discovery
of an old glove lost under snow, how it matches the other
in the basket by itself, no longer untwinned, and never was.
What if we forgave each other, like spring forgives
the earth, able to happen again and again for the first time?
Listening to the Neighbor Girl Who Beat the Moonrise to Pick Something up from the Corner Store during the Pandemic
by Rebecca Hart Olander
Through the slats of my porch she zooms by while I Zoom
a meeting on writing alone with strangers across the country.
Praise be that girl coasting through this late afternoon.
Praise what small bounty of beans or rice likely dangles
from her handlebars. Let there not be an empty porch between us.
I want to hear her without the filter of waved panes of glass
on the old side door. I need her as I need a vaccine or quarantine.
I need her like air. I trust the gravelly pull of scooter wheels,
the way they drag sidewalk grit along with her. I trust the stray bits
of nature caught in her hair, the beads of sweat above her lip,
the way she’ll toss her ride on its side on her front lawn
and what mud will be caught in the grooves of her sneakers.
There she goes, portable silver lining, taking me with her
down the street, tagging along on her fleece tails.
Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Crab Creek Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She has published a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dgp, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. She lives in Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Westfield State University and is editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her at rebeccahartolander.com and @rholanderpoet.