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Volume 14 • Number 1 • Spring-Summer 2022

Suzanne Swanson

Ramshackle

What he could do:
start out. Leave
school behind. Fall
for the oldest aunt
of all. Sort the US
mail. Deliver it.
Sharpen saws. Put up
fake sheetrock. Divide
the basement
into tiny rooms. Add on
a room for the girls
just
big enough
for two twin beds.
Carry the boy
who cannot walk
or see or hear or stand
Into the car so
he can go
along. Put a twinkle
in his own
eye, point it toward
his son. All kidding
aside, love him.

For Durlyn

Osceola Avenue, Late January 2021

Crow in the feeder, too
big to belong. Still,
welcome. Across
the street, a house
of grief. Neighbor’s
flag made beauty by winter

wind. What is the name
of my nation?

Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Recent poems have appeared in Terrain, The Hopper, Salamander, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Texas Borderlands Poetry Review, Poets Reading the News, SWWIM, and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.