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The Spinning Center
Well traveled lovers, we have filled
the same set of suitcases together
for thirty years, know the seams
where grit likes to hide, still
set them side-by-side in the trunk,
on conveyor belts.
Tonight,
in this logged room fixed
in your family for 74 years, I
need you to turn the music off
so I don’t follow the lyrics
to Wildflowers. So I stay
in this room with our suitcases
where your grandparents perhaps
touched each other after four
children and a mistress. Turn
the music off long enough
to board the bed’s space
ship, feel its trembling
lift off.
Us in the galaxy now,
familiar vessels unearthing young pulsars,
moving deep into the Milky
Way, closer to time’s spinning
center than we have ever been—
Second Tuesday of September
A golden shovel after Richard Wright
How clear the sky, a
good morning to walk with the buggy, balmy
with sunshine, garden flags in gentle wind.
My seven week-old reminding
me of air’s soothing power, giving me
an hour’s silence, an hour of
my body all my own. Then something
happens. My husband calls and I
pull the tv out of attic storage, watch people who cannot
withstand any more. That sky, the last they will recall.
Michelle DeRose
Michelle DeRose is Professor of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and African-American, Irish, and world literatures. She is the 2023 recipient of the Faruq Z Bey award for a poem relating to music and the 2022 first place winner from the Poetry Society of Michigan for a poem about loss. You can find some of her recent poetry in The Healing Muse, Dunes Review, The Lakeshore Review, Sparks of Calliope, and G.I. Days: An Anthology of Military Life.