In the Morning in the City
I watch the woman across the way comb
her hair, and she watches me comb mine.
I’ll never understand why the bodega
at the corner had to close, for it’s there
we’d buy yellow roses. I am a child of a man
who loved to sail, and a woman
who loved to do needlework.
On the other side of the door is the man
who, for over fifty years, has been my pearl
person, my moss person.
Together many summers
we’ve watched purple irises bloom.
The mountains we love are old and small,
my love, but then we come home
to the city, and see the woman across
the way at her typewriter as we eat.
We wonder what she’s writing, so intent.
The clouds are so close and the air so still
in this city where my mother died
thirty-four years ago on my birthday.
You make me fried eggs, and I
toast you whole wheat bread,
you with your moustache,
me with my freshly combed hair.
Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), and the author of two poetry collections: Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2012), a University of Wisconsin Press prizes finalist, and The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as three chapbooks. She translated into French the sonnet collection, Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore, Amoureux (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her poems appear in, among others, 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, and Rattle, and in numerous anthologies. Her new collection was a finalist for the 2022 Cider Press Editors’ Book Prize, the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Prize, the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award, the 2024 Tenth Gate Prize, and a quarter finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Press Prize. She lives in New York City and in the Catskill Forest Preserve.