Selections: “A Room Like August in Seattle

From The Fourth River, Issue 12

By Priscilla Atkins

Summer conference for librarians––

blah-goals, blah-objectives; jumbo

tablets and colored markers; chipper

white tables we’re chained to by day.

By night, held up (down?) by lumpy

anorexic mattresses. Only comfort:

a bouquet of casa blanca lilies my

love sent, and a spotty copy of Viktor

Frankl. It can take extremes to make

pretend peace: sexless nights in a seedy

room punctuated with death blooms.

This was a long time ago. Then: I

longed for tulip noise. Now: I am

here, home––two days after the full

worm moon (honestly, I want that job!––

toss me a purple crayon). Sleepy-beauty,

go-nowhere day. Because I’m home

everything wakes exactly when I do.

Through the slats, my little retinas spy

sumo-sized mist-wrestlers summersaulting

in slow motion. I like fog––

loose, feathery. Sun burning through,

like Pike Place Market the morning I

ducked a keynote, hopped a bus, lost

myself in flowers and fish and French

toast. The kind of day I remember

that one thing I forgot to say.

***

Priscilla Atkins grew up in central Illinois, went to college in Massachusetts, taught in Los Angeles for a year and at age 22 shipped her car to Hawaii (with no job lined up), where she stayed for ten years. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Poetry London, and The Los Angeles Review, among other journals. Her collection The Café of Our Departure (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015) is included on the American Library

Association’s Over the Rainbow recommended list for 2016.