Deirdre Lockwood

two poems

How Hard We Try

Sliding the glassware into the autoclave
I thought about it,
how we do our best to burn ourselves clean
for the next generation
but there’s always the gunk at the bottom
that gets baked on.

If only we could return to when
we first understood each other—
that day in the hospital
you looked at me and said
I hope you know what to do
and I latched on.

Waking

Along this seam someone is basting, someone is ripping stitches.
Branches. At their edges, light particular and past blue gathers.
Afternoon already older. Branches thicken into tree
somewhere below and only then: fugue clouds,
how fast they plunged across the sky and left
when someone says that word, the word for you,
says it,
louder,
again.

Deirdre Lockwood is a poet and fiction writer based in Seattle. Her poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Fulbright program, Hugo House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust, Marble House Project, Willapa Bay AiR, and Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and is working on a novel. Find her at deirdrelockwood.com and on twitter @deirdrelockwood.