Four-Way Stop

By Sherry Olson

“Sherry Olson finds poetry everywhere and in just about everything: a jar of buttons, dinner in a restaurant, walking down the streets of New York City, burying a dead bird. Her poems are marvelously ‘existential’ – grounded in the here and now. This quality is not easy to achieve. The poems feel artless while being clearly carefully crafted There are epiphanies by the handfuls in this collection, beautiful moments and language. There is such a generous eye and heart here. Read this book.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020

Book preview

Part I

Talking To Strangers

What Better Words?

Guess what? I love you! booms a voice

from halfway down the block where we walk,

this warm fall night in Manhattan.

---

We are meeting the newlyweds, our son

and now our cherished daughter, for dinner.

Over and over a man behind us shouts,

---

Guess what? I love you! Is he drunk

or high or just happy and in love

with the world? I want to write him off;

---

he sounds goofy, and he’s just so loud.

Still, don’t I feel some days that everyone

in the world belongs to me? This man

---

must feel it too, that all of us belong to him.

I reconsider. What better words

could he shout? At dinner we laugh,

---

talk about our days. I watch Dash

drop a kiss on Erica’s elbow. We savor

the food, but it’s love that fills us up.

---

Later in the street, working on saying good-bye,

we tell them about the man behind us

on the walk here, shouting out his love –

---

perfect, his own way. Time to go. We jostle hugs

and part, calling to each other as we walk away,

Guess what? I love you! again and again.

Journey

I gaze at my amaryllis bulb,

ready now in her pot,

the bulb, papery, scruffy,

repotted year after year.

---

Where does she go

after the great spectacle

of her blooming, other than,

I mean, deep inside herself

---

on the dusty basement shelf?

She’s been away – her mysterious

other life, gathering –

and now I see her green shoot,

---

just arrived, peeking

out of the bulb. You’re back!

I cry. Where have you been?

Tell me everything!

With The Woman At Penn Station

Once in the city, it was late spring

and warm, I sat with a woman

in front of the train station.

She was wearing a black straw hat

and sipping a Coke with a straw.

I was eating a pretzel frosted

with yellow mustard, messy,

and she had bright orange lipstick

smeared on and above her lips.

---

She told me where in the city

to get good buys on toilet paper

and soap. She told me about her hard times,

about her husband,

that he was sick and getting old,

but for most of our conversation,

she was cheerful, loving the talk.

---

When I had to go, she said,

Now don’t talk to strangers.

I won’t, I said.

She said, think about us all the time.

I will, I said. Stopping just across the street

at the door of the hotel,

I looked back and saw her,

never a stranger,

though I didn’t know her name,

watching me still. We waved goodbye.

Think about us all the time, she said.

I will, I told her. I do.

Poetry Group At The Correctional Center

Write about your home

like you’re writing to a friend

who’s never seen it, I tell them.

The women get to work.

I haven’t been coming here long,

and they are shy,

passing their papers over to me

so I can read them to myself.

One woman writes to her friend in the city,

Hi. How ya doin?

and describes a Vermont

with apartment buildings only two stories high,

where the kids leave their bikes outside

unlocked, and they’re still there

in the morning. Where the kids

can go to boys’ and girls’ clubs

and make something of themselves.

I love it here, she ends.

Another woman says, But this place

is my home.