Before the Goldenrod by Erica Appleton
3 Poems by Erica Appleton
Where It Hurts
Sometimes you press a finger to it, or it reaches
you in the velvety things that shouldn’t like fresh
blackberries warmed by the sun. And you don’t
know why a juice stain on a worn shirt takes so
long to peel your tired sights away from.
Sometimes it’s a back straightened and eyes wide
and other times it’s a bathtub gone lukewarm and
carousel lights and old photographs. And empty
hotel rooms and open roads and that the old
supermarket by your childhood home closed
down and the trees you saw as a girl were
burned in their place for steel.
It’s all heartbreak and lost time and regrets
you’re told to ignore. It’s the light shining
through water in a glass on a tablecloth you
stole from your mother for your first apartment.
Secondhand like that.
And maybe it really shouldn’t hurt so damn much
but you let it because the merges of adulthood and
womanhood depends on that pain. It guides you to
more of it, always. You’ve become addicted.
Your children’s laughs. Their first words. Dinner
out with good old friends. Sunrise pouring through
lofty windows. Your husband’s restful face. Your
dog at the foot of the bed. All the good things do
it too. You know their transience.
My Father and I play Time Machine
My father plays an old cassette. I guess the year
and I’m always wrong but close. Dirty feet on
the dash, windows rolled like a dice on the plain
of corn. Blood red clay in the floorboards. Dusty
like a childhood. He doesn’t say much, he never
does, hands rough. Hearing already bad.
I think of him and his RC cars, still. He raced them
in the yard, down at the car parts store on Riverside.
I think of him out in the garage back when I was
curious. Sparks flying and the weld on metal like
a father’s super glue. His study. The old Ford that
collected storage boxes and never ran. A shrine.
It’s one adolescent summer and I’m just like
him, silent but ill with rage. And we’re so calm
together like the ground green with the promise
of a storm. He says something about his mother,
she died when I was one. He’s got that far off look,
the veil that falls like a wall between us. And I know
it’s carbon, steel. I know it will not flow.
He does this sometimes. He brings her back to life
for a moment and I could know her then as more
than the tree in our living room that she grew for
fifteen years before she passed. And I can know
him too, before the split of then and now, life
and loss, a cigarette half spent on a Monday
in late May. Something as inconsequential as
a wasp.
Later when I’m in high school he’ll kill them with tennis
rackets, segmenting their bodies- head, mesosoma, petiole.
I’ll hate them too. It won't be until I’m half
way through my twenties that I realize our hate
was just a vessel, a futile crave for contact.
On my life, I can’t recall what it is, but I remember
looking him in the face somehow almost halcyon
in that single cab and knowing that despite anything
he could ever do wrong, I’d love him more
than I know how.
Touching Gold
I awake at near sunrise to walk my old dog
and light ripples the clouds. It’s cool out, spring is here
and the wild geese sit on the rooftop bickering like
college kids still up at dawn. Take flight overhead
bulky bodies breaking the blue and I wave to the skyline.
The World is early and we know the time like a line on
our skin. We’ve worn it well. The soft March sun finds it
like the rest. Dew on grass. Good goose feathers. Pond
water never quite still. Different at this hour. Gentle.
Mother’s touch. Sun on our face and soon our backs,
warming exhales. Defining. The World at large, at dusk
and dawn, at its little precipices, appeals to us. It
soothes us. The click of paws on the concrete path
and my ambling sleepy feet follow. My old dog and
me. At near sunrise. We are of it. We are everything.
Worms come up to greet us. But we’re not new.
Wisteria livens the woody vines. Something as simple
as color makes us whole. And one day I will crave
this even more in its impossibility. And one later day
this will be Heaven again
Erica Appleton is a recent MFA graduate of the College of Charleston. She has been featured in the winning circle for CofC's undergraduate creative writing contest with her short story, "Out in Her Garden" as well as CofC's 2022 graduate level creative writing contest with her short story "The Precipice". Her poem "To Be the Greenery" was published by Pensive in 2022. Her poem "Beautiful Abomination" will be published with Stirring Lit in April, 2024. Erica spends her free time walking along the low country eastern coast with her loving senior dog and cultivating her indoor garden.