by Anne Kazak
Looking for Mirrors
This morning Marianne Moore was in my laundromat
looking for publishable poets.
I offered her the unspent turns of my dryer
and she answered as I knew she would,
every little bit helps.
Neat as coin in slot,
she sat sipping Fresca to last from wash through dry,
while the glint of her glasses laced with the glint of her eyes.
She sees that clearly?
My back to her in shyness
as I shook out warm wrinkles from a cream-colored skirt,
we would have seen me rise to angel,
except for the edge of human heaviness
that caught my elbows,
folding both arms into awkward angles.
Tonight, vibrations of prehistoric fear woke me.
His odor more familiar than yours,
my sleeping cat is clutched in the crook of my arm.
Blind, I lift a small clock sacramentally,
to count the hours before you might call,
the love you give as good a talisman
as the laundromat-Marianne Moore
against the unnamed darkness,
my self-love impotent,
but for the falling fan of my red hair,
past my ears,
neck,
shoulders,
cloaking the question of wings.
Maren O. Mitchell’s chapbook is In my next life I plan… (dancing girl press); her nonfiction, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press). Her poems appear in Poetry East, The Comstock Review, Hotel Amerika, and Tar River Poetry, with four poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in Appalachia across from a national forest.
Anne Kazak is a psychologist and photographer who cannot remember a time when she didn’t have a camera in her hand. Using cameras or drones, she loves landscapes, capturing the beauty of nature, focusing on light, patterns, and telling a story about places. Her journeys draw her to abandoned spaces and the documenting the history of institutions. As vestiges of the past, these places prompt us to rethink the present. She also frequently uses diptychs or triptychs to juxtapose discrepancies and reveal unexpected connections. www.annekazakphotography.comhttps://www.instagram.com/annekazak.