1968
. . . I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
“Ground Swell,” Mark Jarman
Transistor radios popped
as I teetered on stilts,
a unicycle, a crazily painted
barrel unrolling my name
on yards of grass. From a thick
trunk laddered with slats,
I lofted myself into elm,
forks wedged with planks—
sat tall, drifted among serrated
leaves, imagined falling.
I submerged my body
in the dark deep of a creek
bend, made camp
under a heavy moon,
the night damp gauze,
crickets electric. I stowed
hard sours in slick
cheeks like plugs of tobacco,
my parents, creased at the brow,
hunched over newspapers,
Life magazine, photos
of body bags in long rows.
That was the summer
I knew mistakes could be lies,
too snarled to be ordered—
stories passed on, taken
for truth, and assassinations,
Viet Cong, Tet.
That was the summer
when the plastic horses I liberated
to graze the front yard
balked at the porch’s edge.
Cicadas—fire red eyes
and pulsing screams—buzzed
the leafy canopy, spent
shells clinging tight.
Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust and Moth, Cloudbank, Quartet, Cider Press Review, Tupelo’s Milkweed Anthology, and more. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books (2024); her first, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre (2022). Sisson won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 poetry prize, and her work has placed in several other contests. Her poems have received multiple nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her at www.annettesisson.com, on Facebook or on Instagram.
