Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2026
Amphitheater, poems by LaWanda Walters.
Amphitheater
Let’s pretend that Heaven is merely being
part of an audience. Your work or your mistakes,
your poor showing on the raised dais
are over, now, and all you are expected to do
is sit in an amphitheater with sweet breezes
and dappled light to watch the ongoing play
of how life is. At times, you might enjoy someone
else’s comeuppance, as if this production
were all in your honor. Look how that one who was unkind
to you is no longer such hot stuff herself. Look how she
has softened enough to see, in her mirror,
that she no longer needs to lop off her hair so brutally—
one side so short, the other side as long as Rapunzel.
If her features were too regular, too beautiful to be spoiled
by an odd haircut or unbecoming glasses
(these ugly aids that showed her lack of vanity
while she looked so good anyway), now
she is nearing that stage of life that seems no more
than her own unbecoming. Her rejection of you
was never significant. Why did you take such notice of it?
In the plush theater seat you might be weeping,
now, for your enemy.
Bareback Heroine on Early Television
At the circus or the ranch
on the tv show, you could always count
on the headstrong girl with the broken back,
beautiful in her jodhpurs, but close to naked now—
you could count on her being okay, later, walking
just fine and marrying the man who carried her,
unconscious and almost naked except for an army blanket
wrapped so it looked like a strapless dress.
She’d be just fine, although she had to be undressed,
first, so the doctor could listen to her heart as she lay
in a strapless dress made of an army blanket—
this was to prevent shock, I think they said.
The doctor used his stethoscope to listen to her heart
and then pronounced she’d broken her back.
She was naked and wrapped in a blanket to prevent shock.
That was their excuse, but it really made the show better—
how the doctor who learns she’s broken her back must begin
with getting those clothes off. So it used to be a romantic thing
that made a story better if a beautiful woman was broken.
So we got the wrong idea about doctors—and painters, too,
like the one who seemed romantic to me, knowing my body,
when all I knew came from playing “doctor” with some friends.
I no longer think a story should be violently romantic.
I know the girl in jodhpurs couldn’t walk away forever.
North Carolina Logic
One weekend, they were getting along
and working together to till their lawn.
He’d “borrowed” someone’s pickaxe,
and she was scared at first, but the way it just sank
into the soil, inevitable, made gardening
easier. Fresh tomatoes, and later on, jail.
He had “anger issues” and was in and out of jail.
She’d tricked him into marrying, he said, all along.
She knew he’d love her and their child. The garden
and the little girl would help. They forgot the lawn,
though, and how they’d had fresh tomatoes, sinking
their teeth into the sweet fruit. And that pickaxe—
it lay out on the lawn, half-buried, a pickaxe
that a child could fall on. He’d be in and out of jail.
She wasn’t pretty enough for him, and so he liked to sink
his fist into her jaw, bash her head. She took it for a long
time. He was handsome. He didn’t have to mow the lawn.
She let him buy a Harley, his real love. She’d try to garden.
She worked fulltime as a court reporter, guarding
their child from his drinking, his fist. The pickaxe
must have been out there for years, deep in the weedy lawn,
Chekhov’s gun. One day, she saw it and picked it up. Jail
for life is what she might get. They hadn’t gotten along
for years. What came over her to think she could sink
that pickaxe into the head of her husband as he lay, sunk
in a Coors Lite dream? The glancing blow just put him on guard.
Wide awake, he was chasing her. She would not have long
to live now. Thank God her girl was at a party! The pickaxe
had not worked. Had she meant it to? Who would go to jail
now for murder? He was strangling her while he called the law.
She got to the kitchen drawer. Why did she go out to the lawn
and pick that thing up? Adrenalin? Her hands slick, she sank
a kitchen knife into his stomach and forgot about murder or jail.
Once you start to kill a snake, you’d better stay on guard.
She stabbed herself too, but that bloody pickaxe
witnessed from the floor. The snake was dead before too long.
And before too long, there were lights circling on the lawn,
a noir effect, blinking black and white, inside where the pickaxe
spoke: There are no gardens in the jail, and now you’re sunk.
© LaWanda Walters
LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Nine Mile, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.