Michael Todd Steffen’s poems and articles have appeared in Connecticut Review, Poem (HLA), ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and in the window of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. His is the co-director of the Hastings Room Poetry Reading Series in Cambridge, Mass.

Leaving Usher Street

Snugly into cardboard tubes the prints
Were stowed to lie safe in the moving van.
The picture frames left by the wall held nothing—
Their mystery. Without the evidence…

A motley acrobat had posed in one.
Others I remembered vaguely filled—
Vine on a trellis, old west trail, an island…
Imagined they had been. Now they had gone

Like granddad’s speech and recollection thanks
To the stroke that put him in the hospital
Where mom and her sisters, “daddy’s portraits,” sat
Drawing from their creator searching blanks.

The frames in oak or varnished pine at last
Were packed off with the rest of our belongings
For the new house. While this one’s walls widened—
Of our tomorrows emptied, of its past.

— Michael Todd Steffen

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