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Lynne Zika’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary publications: Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, The Anthology of American Poets, etc. She has written for newspaper and radio and for trade and consumer magazines. In addition to editing poetry and nonfiction, she worked as a closed-captioning editor for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. She received a Pacificus Foundation Literary Award in short fiction, and her photography has received the Celebrity Award and the 2020 Choice Award from Viewbug.

A Time Comes

Meet my body.
Her name is Gertrude.
She sits at a green Formica table
amidst Lucky Strikes,
a plate of petrified scrambled eggs,
four bobby pins, a book of Kenyon poems,
her 1937 marriage certificate
ringed with coffee stains,
a half-filled bottle of High Life,
one butt floating in disintegrating foam.

Gertrude rises from the table,
considers the Lucky Strikes,
too settled in the tableaux to disturb.
She leaves by the kitchen door,
left ajar behind her,
cherry-red curtains rippling
in a sudden gust of breeze.

Gertrude follows the decline of Second Avenue
until the wood-frame houses
give way to fields
and the poor man’s conservatory
of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace.
She mounts a red tractor
a noontime farmer has left waiting in his field.
From such a throne
Gertrude can see the woods edged in muscadine,
the chinaberry tree shading the kitchen el
where the farmer and his wife
bend to the task of cornbread
and vinegared greens.
Gertrude starts the engine,
fiddles with levers and gears,
clamps a sneakered foot to pedal
and drives away.

Probably they’ll find her
stalled in a ditch somewhere,
wheels spinning toward blue sky,
and if she isn’t dead
haul her down to the sheriff’s
for possession of stolen property
and endangerment of public safety;
but lying in her cell that night,
the clink of the sheriff’s hardware
punctuating the dark,
she’ll think how an ugly old woman
roared to freedom
and of the power of the noonday sun.

— B. Lynne Zika

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