Audrey Walls
Audrey Walls currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she is a current MFA student in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is constantly homesick for places she has never lived, including Toronto, Canada, La Paz, Mexico, and Carrboro, North Carolina.
Two Poems (September 20, 2010. Issue 21.)
Sun Tea in September
The last glass of sun tea never tastes the same as the firstbrew, made in the middle of heat waves with the rinds of limes
stuck to the pitcher sides. The warm sugar-sand bottom
swirls and melts with ease, tea bags floating as buoys.
We follow the light across the porch, displacing mason jars
from the shade and back into the beams, balancing metal
lids and pulling on tea strings, watching the blossoming layers
of amber and clear. Then, a sudden swirl of the spoon,
a typhoon tilts in the glass, squeezes of citrus. We follow
these signs now, with history’s strictest obedience. Aware
of the arc we stand upon, we hope nonetheless. Closing
our eyes, we drink for the first taste, swallowing, anticipating
the burn of ginger-root or the last drop of honey on the tongue.
El Huérfano (The Orphan)
Ana María stands at seven
years old, barefoot in the backyard
of her grandmother's house, running
a gnawed thumb against the grain
of her braided basket. The arms and
legs of the morning's washing sway
in the summer wind: the whites
and blues of sheets and dresses.
Standing on toe-tops, she stumbles
with the clothespins, yanking down
towels and shirts, line by line, folding
the stiff hot fabric into squares
that she stacks upon the yellow grass.
Her eyes catch the sloth sleeping –
un perezoso clinging slackly to her
clothesline: grey-green fur flowing
upside down, a square black nose
with wet nostrils, eyes closed.
Buenos días, dormilón. She cannot see
its ears, dismayed at its deafness.
Espero que hayas dormido bien.
She shakes down another pair of pants,
studying the sloth's three yellow claws:
long as plantains and stained with brown.
¿Por qué no estás en la selva?
The sloth swings in the sun, dormant
and dumb, as she clamps another pair
of clothespins between her teeth, a third
to pull back her hair. With one tan hand
on the door, and her basket balanced on
her thin hips, a voice rises and sighs
like rustling leaves: Porque la selva
está llena de ladrones…She does not look
back to see the sloth’s eyes: open and black,
shining like glass with the gloss of tears.