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Barbara Reynolds is a poet and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Lesley University. She has lived in Somerville, Massachusetts for over thirty years and frequently takes walks on Somerville Avenue, picking up poems along the way. Her poems have appeared in Pangyrus, Avocet, Indolent Books: What Rough Beast, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Somerville Times, Willowdown Books anthology Poems from The Lockdown, Riddled with Arrows, and Somerville Poetry Open 2021: Together In Poetry. Maybe I Can Dream a Title was nominated for publication in Best of the Net Anthology by Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal.

Where Some See Blight

Barbara Reynolds

Sometimes along this thoroughfare while on a daily walk,
I spy a winter’s hawk, a twilit almond breasted white,
treed high against a skirtless sky

or see in spring amid a drift of French fry fumes
and gasoline, a cagey sparrow’s nest bridged
behind a café’s neon sign.

Below a rusted iron fence along the railroad tracks
communes a patch of common mullein that stretch their necks
to groom their fruited caps,

and there is a place where evergreens, dwarfed and backed by sooty bricks
spread their wings to touch my offered fingertips
and tickle summer’s naked knees like saucy petticoats.

I hail the heedless brass of cottontails
snitching blades of grass beside the cemetery gates,
ignoring blasts of buses caterwauling by

and I confess succumbing to the carport arbor’s lure
when twining vines balloon their grapes and sail
an august fragrance to seduce my nose.

And always I allow a littered wind to autograph my back
as cunning strips of sunlight seam between facades of aging stores
and shadow me home.

 — Barbara Reynolds