Kyle Laws

Carousel

We never sat side-saddle on a carousel but
straddled the horses as if racing across a field
on the way to the beach late in the afternoon
before lights came on and the boardwalk
buzzed with Watch the tramcar, please.

A carousel was our first exposure to saddle
and mane until we discovered Hidden Valley
Ranch on the back road to Cape May Point
only ranch still left along the Delaware Bay
so we rode there every cloudy day we could.

We had a remnant from another time before
a fishing village became all two stories
with a view to the last sandbar at low tide.  
Mother would dive down to the muck
between rises, come up with a plastered face.

I left in my twenties, returned to sand dusted
streets and a tideline now one rail that launched
motorboats into the bay, my brother having
worked at Abananni’s Pier, one of many
until he joined the Coast Guard.   

Wildwood Villas was a town constructed by
Joseph and Clara Millman, immigrants from
Russia and Odessa on the sea from farmland
of yeoman whalers. She died young, closest
hospital across the bay and 75 miles north.

Her husband never forgave himself for stranding
her. But he also never went home, left a fortune
to build a hospital where my sister was born as
the sun turned to autumn and mother waited out
the loneliness of everyone gone home for school.

Another Perspective

After kicking his son out of the house
my husband calls and asks me
to step out onto the balcony
and look at the sky
tell him what I see. 

Big clouds in the direction of your house, I reply.
No writing in the sky? he asks.
No, not that can I see.

An email comes in from a woman I share
an apartment with at my fall residency
who wants to know if I’m OK with her switching
apartments so someone from Binghampton
doesn’t have to share with 3 people
not from Binghampton. 

That both are going on at the same time
is somehow strange.
It doesn’t seem right to respond to someone’s
possible discomfort as to who 3 people share an apartment
with six months from now when I don’t even know
what’s going to happen with 3 people in the same family
between now and dinner.

Mesa

Always wanted to come West
for college in New Mexico
where the Rockies are
as was the Santa Fe Trail
and the Southwest Chief
where I could load a baggage car
in Philadelphia with two large suitcases
and the captain’s table from a ship hatch
bought the summer we met
on the boardwalk.

I did not expect buffalo
thought them gone by the time of Kit Carson
nor cassocks of priests in the San Luis Valley
nor the wild mares descended
from Coronado‘s journey for a city of gold
lost when he crossed the Arkansas River into Kansas
and El Camino became a sainted road
not the front seat of a car with open bed of truck
the end of high school as hard as the change
from rotary phone to touch-tone.

 

Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs the Pueblo Poetry Project. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021, winner of its 2020 award), Uncorseted(Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence coauthored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.