by Amy Gerstler
keep walking
little dust devils kick up at your feet whirlwinds ankle deep take the most delightful route home fill your noggin with snow or some other calm mental weather devise new myths and religions where necessary recall vanished streets and meeting places tell the monk in persimmon-colored robes approaching from the opposite direction singing with his mouth full of donated bread what a relief it is that his library of guesses about the future is all wrong yours too o holy mendicant what a marvel you are skipping and stumbling as gradually the countryside becomes more rolling an unearned sense of familiarity blooms is he an incorrect reincarnation of you and you of him in that each manifests what was banished in the other he smells of manhood all day he worked harvesting pungent herbs is it always true that love is better than nothing if something wondrous starts to happen will you let it is it too soon to tell the story of you two working silently together to bury small dead animals you find by the roadside mice and birds where the earth is soft enough to receive them soft as a rough hug you listen to him recite a few words over hurriedly dug tiny graves what you feel you can't say his verses mean no more than faded illustrations in some book from childhood which is to say everything
ode to the pillow
Must a pillow, that cushiony head-welcomer, always concede to our cheeks? Can it nurse no higher ambition than to impersonate a marshmallow? Might a pillow never stand up for itself? Does it possess no intrinsic personality? Must it shun sharpness, remain nothing but slump and mush, never displaying its anger or will? The sad fact seems to be that for all its virtues the pillow lacks backbone. Smooth and cool to the touch, clad in a fresh pillow slip, my pillow for tonight exhales a whiff of the steam iron's disciplinary rigor, but transformed, its cotton sweetening the iron's hot metal breath—the breath of a prison matron—into something more like the breath of a meadow. A shock absorber, a pillow is more forgiving than a priest (much is spilled onto it: think dream leakage). And a pillow functions well as a confessional. The sick and the helpless may be buoyed up, as if by a life raft, while clinging to their pillow, or they may be smothered with one into a final goodnight. Like the uncomplaining potato, the pillow is willing to take shape according to people's needs, enduring mashing after mashing. Pillows have no sense of their own splendor. Employed as ineffectual weapon a pillow can of course burst and snow feathers, drizzle fluff or rain buckwheat husks...and herein lies the pillow's mysterious connection to weather. It's believed pillows subsist on a diet of fog and cloud, though no one has ever seen them eat.
Amy Gerstler's most recent book of poems is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor, and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play.