On cat’s feet
night is slowly becoming
unafraid, sitting beneath
the pecan tree, follows
the fingertips of the sun
warm and kind that
stroked over its back or
rather night stroked it
the day looks back as if
to say, I must be on my
way.

Breath, sleep, start a new day.
A Tuesday.
A blue day.
Try-not-to-come-unglued day.
Epically different from the last,
that ghost of Tuesday past,
how might it be called by the same name?
Tues
Like “Twos”
Like legs and gloves and
socks and shoes.
Like there was me and there
was you.
There you were,
naked by tongue
and not by skin.
Shaking in head
and shoulders and chin.
On bruise day.
I lose day.
That devil-rotten Tuesday where we stood
hearts in our mouths
and said “swallow.”

An act so hollow that walls build around it
not to be smashed
by hammer or foe of any kind
but instead only relieved by the sweet,
comforting touch
of new love.
Venom to me now, but
one day.
One day, indeed
That old, swallowed heart will come back to recall
it still beats, still flutters, still runs
after all, it still lives in this chest. Still races,
still feels,
still knows how to forget,
how to be done
feeling used and abused
living miserable “Tues”
when I should have been One.

POET’S BIO SKETCH: Brianna Barrett grew up in a lovely, little house tucked away in a little pocket in the forest outside of Portland, Oregon. She said, “Our roof was two different colors that didn’t match, but had flowerboxes under every window and a big front yard with a patio where I would draw entire towns out of side-walk chalk.” Now, older, Brianna is a screenwriter and filmmaker bouncing between Portland, LA, and dreams about Canada.

Deciding she was alive/
that was the first thing. Stars

in the sky again, coleus
in their epigrammatic color:

admirable. Drifting from afternoon walk
to saturnine conversation, beginning
of acute ache
of desire for other things. A newness,
the confliction. So easy, forgotten
by women whose lives she sometimes intersected.

Feeling like an interloper, or merely
incidental. An incomplete orchestra
missing its percussion, the strings tight.

Deciding
she was alive,
she auditioned players, found
her timpani.

“I’m a human battery,” she explained –
apologetically. Harry Smith
was sure he discovered her
in the Museum of Non-Objective Painting while compiling
his archive. A man I knew in New York
said she was the second stanza
in a song he once heard at CBGB’s. After
several years of napping on lawns all over the city,
I saw her in a bar, parsing
white wine as though it were poetry.

I am told/
that sometimes things just fall from the sky,
and no god will answer for them.

I’m afraid of bridges, her promises
and certainty. Because who exist like that
but charlatans and fathers. And men who
aspire to one or the other, like low-level confidence men
who can’t even convince themselves.

When we drove looking for a restaurant, I avoided
the rivers, those places
that could require machinery.

Please don’t misunderstand me – there are photographs
of her circulated . . . of course/
“Woman at Kitchen Table,” “Female
in Repose,” “Healing.”
I just hadn’t seen them. But/

they were there: rivers. Those places that require
bridges, intersections, interlopers. The oyster grey sheen
of breaking.

POET BIO SKETCH: Michael Opperman lives and works in Minneapolis. His work has appeared in the Coe Review, New Hampshire Review, Maverick Magazine, Dislocate, and MARGIE Review. Michael was also a finalist for the Marjorie J. Wilson Prize for Best Poem Contest and winner of the Academy of America Poets James Wright Prize for Poetry.