Kelly R. Samuels

​Treacherous Spring
 
First, rain. Then, ice (the lilacs frozen mid-bloom), then, rain. April the cruelest, the erratic, the month I was born. It disorients and confounds. We travel westward to leave flowers at a grave, a small smooth stone someone will pocket and palm. All the fields look ravaged, chewed at by wind. When I was seven…when I was nine…, back we go the way we came, veering north in time to where the lakes resemble ponds, more like, and the geese saunter as if swans.

**

If Living, Somewhere
 
Even if prone on the couch, in the bath, near the lilacs with their burnt curled leaves, there is, always, a location. It cannot be helped. Sometimes, I am elsewhere: north, where the weather patterns differ in noticeable ways sometimes. Nevertheless, I do not feel weightless. There are walls and the rough nap of the rug underfoot. There is where they cut and burned, as they termed it, just above my left knee, now bandaged. Little clouds pass outside the window. The ruinous sun dutifully shines. No one, here, steals the street signs; they announce themselves to anyone who bothers to notice. Vine or Pine. Avenue or Drive. It was difficult to recall in May, back when we were elsewhere, even more north, with snow. Elsewhere-elsewhere, the windmill’s blades turn again with much rejoicing.

**

Still Owls, Here
 
Though the swans have driven out the herons, and the rooks…well, let us not speak of the rooks. It doesn’t take long to disrupt wherever we are. We can clap our hands, calling high-pitched. Clear the grove. We can announce how the minutes add up to a year and we should hustle it along, swiftly departing for other more pleasurable climes. Though it takes six months for fingernails to fully regrow and over twice that for those others we so often keep shod. So, there. He reported as we age, everything takes longer to heal, and I was not to go out in the sun. I was to avoid higher elevations. When I asked which way to the sea, he shrugged, as if the question was strange and inland was preferable and not to be shunned or disparaged.

**

Beginning in the Middle
 
It’s a pity, and I heartily agree most days come evening. Come the breeze dying down as it does. Where I’m found, that matters. The room grows stale and nothing can be done about it. I pace to generate motion. I search for houses near large bodies of water. I miss the herons and even the cantankerous swans.

**

Ringing Bell
 
What’s that bell ringing, she asked. I did not know, still do not know. And what of the ship’s remains discovered on the seafloor after all these years? What are we to do with them? Salvage or let rest? I might have always been displaced, and this is why I could not/cannot recognize the bell and its tolling. It does not come from the south where the cathedral has stood for over sixty years, of limestone, its steeple’s stones dropping, in need of repair. Maybe northward? Maybe I am past the middle of my life having never really begun and this is explanation for everything.

**

Settling
 
Anywhere, she said, would seem strange to me that did not. Which is why we pace and sit and then rise and take a drive to consider the lake, however stagnant and lacking tides it is. A thorough disappointment. Settle, I was told. Settle your tail feathers, breathe. Now is the quiet time. Listen: our molecular levels shift, suddenly, at 44, at 60, roughly, on average, every one of us. We are not what we once were. And where are the swans? Gone.  
      
**
 
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and five chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence, a finalist for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award (Red Sweater Press, 2024), and The Sailing Place (Bottlecap Press, 2026.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in Blue Earth Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, and The Glacier. She lives in the Upper Midwest.