Frannie Lindsay
Sunset
For once they aren’t drinking, instead
they are taking each other’s clothes off
with balletic awkwardness,
as if they knew
exactly how frightened to be by joy,
then letting them drift—
the drab and precisely-tailored trousers,
the crayon-bright skirt—slowly out
any window willing to open
Clydesdale
The angel who bore my sister away
was a Clydesdale gelding,
flanks broad in the evening peace.
He stood in a meadow
off Star Route 3 on the way
out of Boulder, not knowing
the colorless air already adrift wasn’t
a willow limb’s sweep across his mane
but a dimming girl on his back,
or that I’d stopped less to offer
my apple left from lunch,
than to bow my head
to the Lord who tends mares
at their midnight
birthings, the Lord who steadies
the stick-slender legs of newborns
ambling wetly over
dark pastures, the Lord
who now lay August’s still palm
across the day’s smooth back
like a coarse, clean blanket.
Also by Frannie Lindsay: "Bead," "After," "Elegy Against Itself," "Prayer for My Rapist," "The Rabbits of Upland Road"
Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife, was released in 2020 from Cavankerry Press. Her awards include the May Swenson Award, the Perugia Prize, the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Washington Prize, The Missouri Review Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Yale Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Plume, Salamander, Field, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She teaches workshops on the poetry of grief and trauma. She is also a classical pianist.
ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022