BEVERLY HEAD - POEMS

Beverly Head is retired after 38 years of college teaching.  Her book of poetry Walking North, published by Michigan State University Press as part of the Lotus Poetry Series, was the second winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.  Her work has been published in Haiku Journal, Red River Review, Wildflower Magazine, Eunoia Review, Number One, and 365 Tomorrows.

​Letters Into Compost

Your letters
have turned into compost.
Most of them were full
of garbage.
Promises as dark as
old banana peels,
pledges so eloquently
deceptive,
your letters were frauds,
their stench like some unknown
food going bad in the refrigerator.
Imposter,
your letters have decayed,
but I don’t think anything
will grow from them.
​

Soft Murmurings

​The pigeons are cooing
on the back roof again.


My son is afraid.
He has heard them before
And thinks they are ghosts.


I try to erase his fears,
but I am afraid
of the soft murmurings,
and the other fears that fly
in from the night into the morning
to settle above our heads.

Silverware

Can silverware be sexy?
 
Folks, spoons, and knives
engaging in a ménage a trois?
 
Seducing each other
over plates of shrimp and grits?
 
Spoons do fit into each other
like bed-bound lovers.
 
Folks do thrust their prongs.
 
But knives, always erect,
have too many cutting, maiming,
castrating qualities
to be seductive.

​After the Red Clay Hills

​After the red clay hills of Georgia,
the flat black winter fields
of small-town Illinois
startled me.


You startled me,
arriving one night
with grocery bags
filled with food
for dinner that you fixed
in my never used kitchen.


I could not refuse you,
a man who fed me
so eloquently.


But by the end of summer,
I wanted the red clay hills
and my virginity back.

​Green Cat

​If she had kept it
to herself,
I would have never
known that her new husband
had paid me a compliment
at their wedding,
but she let the green cat
out of that green bag
to slink around the room,
to slip in and out
of our conversation,
and once
the green cat was out,
it could not be put back.