Editor’s note: Every month GT publishes the work of a local poet. This month we introduce you to Maggie Paul. Her work has appeared in Poetry Miscellany, Smartish Pace, the Sarasota Review, Monterey Poetry Review, Rattle and other journals. Her chapbook, “Stones From the Baskets of Others,” was published by Black Dirt Press.

Akhmatova

Now we recall
the anguish of mothers for sons, widows
for perished husbands
and what it means to mourn
the ruined remains of healthy men
as Anna Akhmatova did
waiting three hundred hours
outside the prison walls in Leningrad
with a package for her son,
where they never unbolted the doors
for me…

I can still see my mother sobbing
beneath the wing of the plane
that carried my 18 year old brother to Vietnam.
Six of us then, our coats flapping in the wind,
we could hardly hear his boyish words
behind the noise of the engine.

We are guilty of what the stars accuse us,
of sleeping while others fight,
of letting dawn wake while the world comes
to its end moment by moment across the sea.

Charlie O’s

Sometimes I get the feeling it doesn’t matter anymore—
one unfinished beginning begets another.
Like ghosts, they follow us around
while we try to ignore our failures.

Take that guy at Charlie O’s. He comes in
to blow smoke rings in the ladies’ hair, or run
his eyes up and down their fishnets. Even in winter
he sees beneath their polartec blues and imagines the
black nets he’d like to get caught in.

Our conversation started like this:
No, I don’t come here often.
Tell you the truth, I don’t come
at all unless I’m glued to some video
that shows me positions even I’ve never tried before.
Then he’s with me, hanging
on every word. I could be the one, he thinks
but keeps it under his nicotine tongue. I could make her

Come over here, I say, leading him
to the pool table. Let me see you break
into the blues, break into the boy you once were
the boy who couldn’t go to sleep at night without the sound
of his mother’s voice in his ear, the boy who ran away from home
looking for her after she died, knowing she’d never leave you
all alone. He picks up the cue and twists the point into the blue chalk
like there’s no tomorrow, remembering how it felt
when he realized there really was no tomorrow, only
one day piled on top of another like wooden blocks,
each day an unfinished beginning.

Sometimes I tell myself it’s all right nothing’s ever
finished. It’s enough to know I could have
if I tried. I try this on like a pair of black fishnets
but they never did look good on me.

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