publishing poetry chapbooks
 


Monday's Poem




© Lesley Strutt

How Never to Feel, nor Wish to Do So

With my fingernail I trace
a line down your wide

belly. Past the curve and
into the soft hair I slide

my nail until it brushes
up against your hip and I glide

it down along open space
then to your foot where it rides

the valley of each toe, and in
those valleys finds a place to hide,

stay a minute (or two), then I tickle
your arch and come to rest, to reside,

on the heel. Why? Where tough skin meets
fingernail—pale carapace—always on the outside.

I seem to be a wanderer. I've lived in the UK, France, and the Netherlands before finally settling in Canada. I even sailed a small boat to the Caribbean and back. A water sign in astrology, I flow from one place to another, perhaps too easily, looking for the holes to slide through and drip, drip, drip into a new experience. On the outside I look calm, but inside I'm bubbling with restlessness, the need to escape whatever is confining me at the moment. My poems are about the forces that surround us and how we change or don't change in response to them.