My Mother Chasing Ursa Major
       

Now she is impossibly young. Now she is flung

out of doors, sails from the drab kitchen

to the scrap of yard. Downhill from the house

a faint hollow of crabgrass, thatch sewing itself together

under scabbed feet. Postholes in the dirt,

little shelters where she can stow her panicked hands.

But not tonight. For once she uses them

deliberately; there is no truce with vertigo. There is

only the blaze and the movement of claws and tail

spinning hungry around her, the bear's great beer gut

hanging loose over the stunned, still world.

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Copyright © 2015 Suzanne Roszak All rights reserved
from Fourteen Hills
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission