Susan Azar Porterfield – Marriage

Profile Porterfield LEP&W May 2021

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2021

Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of three books of poetry—In the Garden of Our Spines, Kibbe (Mayapple Press) and Dirt, Root, Silk, which won the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review (finalist, Loraine Williams poetry prize), Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere.  She is the editor of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk (Ohio UP) and has written on poetical subjects for Poets & Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Translation Review.


Marriage

On his ritual walk
he looks for blue

shell shard, seed pods,
a hand-shaped leaf.

Bring me something,
I say.

Therefore
are his eyes not his alone.

Angles and glints 3D-pop
from background flat, stop

him mid-step: a feather,
penny made of steel.

Keep a dime in your shoe
the elders used to urge.

Love demands baggage,
carry us, carry we each inside

the other inside
the world pocketed home.


© Susan Azar Porterfield