Daylily Attempts a Seduction


“We don’t see many that can move like you,”

she cried. “It isn’t right for me to speak first.


But see my ruffled, fluted petals, my raspberry eye?

Drink in my small and chartreuse throat,”


she said tremblingly. “I beguile like a sari.

Come away from that rose. Touch my delicate


lavender flesh, my lime-green heart. You’re faded,

disarrayed, and brown; still I wish you’d see


that in one flower, I’m many.” She caused a stir

in the breath of the bear who’d entered the garden,


whose nose caught a smell as enticing as claret.

As she’d seemed to desire, he ate her up.




Echo Regains Her Voice


How evolution has labored

to achieve these miracles:


the graceful and

the loutish and


the rest of us. For us

words offer no relief


even when we’re at ease

and whether we begin


in certainty or doubt

we end in doubt


though sometimes

we decide to be happy.


“What’s mine is yours”

said the golden-haired man.


That’s my story

and I’m sticking to it.




Neighborly


At your face I stare and stare

I know that there’s a poem in there.


But when I try to read your face

I end up getting just no place.


And so I creep back down the hall

and listen to you through the wall.


My friends all think this very strange,

they fear that I am in some dange


r, that I've lost my savoir-faire,

but I just like your yellow hair.




Discontentment in March


The stir and the warmth

and the strong feel of life


that come with spring are

irritating, don’t you think?


Only serving as reminders

we’ll be clinging


to radiators as senior citizens,

poor old bags of bones


who should’ve got real jobs

and maybe had children


so we won’t have to eat

government cheese alone.


Still, I wish spring were here.

I tell Mother, but she says,


Oh no! If spring were here

you’d get spring fever.


Then you’d be dangerous.

But I’m danger already,


as you well know.

Here we’ll all live forever,


each in her own room

with a cat by the window.

Dawn Corrigan's poetry and prose have appeared in a number of print and online journals, most recently The Citron Review, The Bookends Review, and Feile-Festa. Her debut novel, an environmental mystery called Mitigating Circumstances, was published by Five Star/Cengage. Currently she's working on a family saga set in southern Italy, Hell's Kitchen, and South Jersey.
She lives in Gulf Breeze, Florida.

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