Issue Twenty - Summer 2012

Vagrant Waltz

By Sylvia Byrne Pollack

For Yaffa

It’s time in mid-summer
to think about nothing,
turn from ideas,
make ice cream instead,
float on a raft of popsicle sticks.

You will know when to get up,
wield pencils like chopsticks,
tease apart vagabond thoughts
meandering through your mind.

When bedraggled ideas knock
at your door, don’t turn them
away. Like your mother before you
give handouts to hoboes –

a sketch of a cat will be
etched on your gate.
Words will come tramping
into your dreams, vamp
your domesticated mind

with rumbles, a jungle
utterly outside your safe picket fence.

Copyright Pollack 2012

Sylvia Byrne Pollack is a hard-of-hearing poet and retired scientist, whose work appears in Floating Bridge Review, Quartet, Crab Creek Review, The Stillwater Review and many other print and online journals. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she won the 2013 Mason's Road Literary Award, was a 2019 Jack Straw Writer and a 2021 Mineral School Resident. Both her debut full-length collection Risking It (2021) and her new collection, What Lasts (2023) were published by Red Mountain Press. Visit her at www.sylviabyrnepollack.com

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