MARCIA J. PRADZINSKI - POEMS

Marcia J. Pradzinski, an award-winning poet, lives in Skokie, Illinois. Her poems have been featured in print journals, anthologies, and online. Recent and forthcoming publications include   Redheaded Stepchild, Clementine Unbound, Your Daily Poem, and Ink In Thirds. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Left Behind in 2015. She credits Plumb Line Poets, her cadre of fellow poets, for helping her stay productive. When not reading or writing, she enjoys water aerobics, qigong, walking, and going to movies.

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​An Accordion of Days

​Sunlight creeps in without warning,
bleaches my dreams and tosses them
 
skyward where emptiness guards
the space I need to move, to think.
 
No shadows follow me there, I fuse
with the face and open breath of time.
 
Silence surrounds and consoles until I hear
a blue jay shrieking. Life
 
scrapes its way in –
an awakening like this won't hold.

How Did You Get This Number?
​

​I fall asleep and in a dream I'm a man
named Larry the Apothecary of Gary, Indiana.
But for the sake of sanity I can't remember
how or when I transformed. And now I'm
chatting with a drummer, a blacksmith,
and a dog catcher – as we all gather 'round
in the square. Or the Plaza? (Or maybe
the Ramblas? uhh...Spain?) How did we
get to Spain? In fact I can't say I know anything
anymore after I give my presentation, “Duck Hunting
with an AK47-101”, (which I am, in no way, 
qualified to do), but the professor insists despite
my pitiful lack of preparation so I read
from a sheet I cadged from The New Wikipedia,
and as I fire a pop gun at a squirrel near
the birdfeeder everything resolves in a flash:
I'm not Larry but Merry (that's me), the amateur
lapidary who's making pendants with Ak47 charms
for birdwatchers in the neighborhood.

​Washing Dishes
            “water had wings” ~ Melissa Studdard

​Water runs clear and smooth
over each dish, each pot,
pan, and tumbler as it
bubbles into the blue
champagne flute
and flows over the heirloom
wine glass etched with leafy stems
and what resembles red elf coreopsis –
the wine glass itself like
a bowl-shaped flower with gentle
curving petals.
 
Water streams over my hands,
dry from winter cold,
now bathed in warmth –
 
washing dishes
such a simple task                   
like nothing, but now taking me
from the kitchen
and out to the flow
                                                                                   
of water from the city
filtered in lake cribs,
water from the lake
alive with perch, smelt, alewives
water reaching the lake
from tributary arms of larger waters
as it circles back to me and
my kitchen faucet.