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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
Getting Ready for Work, poems by Susan Azar Porterfield.
Getting Ready for Work
Lifting, I take her out, then coffee,
the Times, teeth, and doing the face, anxious
not to hurry the creation
who stands now, mirrored.
First one leg slipped into and then here
is the other, adjusting, adjusting,
making room in the head,
pushing something or someone aside.
And always there is sadness at this cleaving,
a kind of floating in suspense
for the return. Crazy fear
that the time will never come.
Oh, I’ll be adrift forever,
the orphan cries,
never to shed these spike heels, dig
for bulbs to burst like falling stars
in startling spring
or feel that nonchalance, unrepentant
as a robe.
Never witness in my kitchen
the ruby of these apples, gracious,
in their lapis-colored bowl.
Bad Daughter Poem/
Fear of Becoming Like My Mother
It’s like as if a foot became a shoe,
or even shoe-shaped,
as if my head became my hat after
a nine-month housing.
Sluiced through my skin and veins,
pulsed as hum must be she/me.
Me in that natal room–
cage or jail–the hooked-up coop
that press-ganged me into twin,
evil twin (sorry, Mom!),
snitch, whistleblower, mole
who’s inched out the workings
of her darkest innermost, as only, surely,
we loving daughters do.
Nature Never Did Betray
the Heart that Loved Her
We fancied birds or mice could use the hair
I’d trimmed for you out on the deck, so gentle,
we gathered strands, as if they might yet live,
and nested them atop the flagstone wall.
We dreamed a new life:
you as a couch for the winter, you
as furnace, you as crib. We imagined silk,
like seashells, small gifts in a sparrow’s beak,
treasure given unasked.
Alas, no one came.
For months from the window, we watched
‘til they blurred into stone, the curls,
staining the brownish rock brunet.
Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of four books of poetry: Voice/Poems (Trio House) In the Garden of Our Spines, Kibbe (Mayapple Press) and Dirt, Root, Silk, which won the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize. Individual poems are in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Barrow Street, EcoTheo, Painted Bride, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, Slipstream, Room, Ambit, Magma. She is the editor of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk (Ohio UP) and has written for Poets & Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, Translation Review, The Midwest Journal of the Modern Language Association. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Poetry and a Fulbright to Lebanon.
https//:susanazarporterfield.com
