Poetry: Hopcroft

TINDERBOX, 1958

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

 
In my head it’s June on
Fisher’s Island and my mother’s
mother is dying for cottage

blossoms. The paper edges
curl where she’s cut the paste
with sweat, toeing a
ladder to hoist up wall
flowers in the damp.

Her breath is
gin. I want to trade

all our aeroplanes for a
dinghy, knead harbor and
sound with my boat bottom to
dock there and shuck her

clams. Their little necks frying in
the pan, she’ll turn from

turpentine and not upend it, not
renovate the house to ash
and dust. Really it

was paint and not
paper—but
ashes, ashes all
the same.
 

 

SHOOT, RAIN, ROOF

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

 
Nothing probably in the wide world will be like
that Sunday when a tempest was just plain
not sufficient to keep you

from reaching out arms opening large and
red your lips mouth throat not
minding if maybe pneumonia would
enter in belting it your fierce unbottled

message so the gale forces might buffet each
syllable aloft as individually wrapped
tokens of some post-apocalyptic form of

prayer while the best eyes of Paris tracked your
own his umbrella shadow leering left and
right over the lens in a kind of tap
dance on small stones yes it was some quasi-

Kelly moment let me tell you that I saw
snatches of through the chicken wire
panes watching chef’s hat exhaust

hatches twirl in time and probably nothing in the
frigid the sweltering the no god forbid not
tepid world will ever turn up that is quite

like it but no doubt after this it
will be in our power to find out
 


Suzanne Marie Hopcroft is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Everyday Genius, PANK, elimae, and Gargoyle. Suzanne also teaches composition at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.

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