Poetry by Claudia Kessel
Paint chips off the deck
Bare feet smear sun across wood
A melting of hours
Orange, nameless barn cat
slinks between blue hydrangeas
Day drifts to evening
Something splinter-sharp
slices August’s humid breath:
Cicada vibration
Trucks speed the backroads
Launching from lily to lily
bees zip across faces
Black walnut fingers
release twittering sparrows
Limbs curtsy in wind
My son collects eggs
from the white-rimmed chicken coop
His life has not changed
Abandoned silo
Mourning dove’s alto lament
Swallow’s coloratura
Mulberries scatter
Stain the gravel indigo
Wasps inspect new jewels
My fingers trace keys
of his Baldwin piano
Ivory absent of his broad thumbs
Only when I sing
alone by his piano
do I un-trap myself from myself
Sunset’s greasy smudge
Not necessarily happiness
Neither unhappiness
Green dappled stillness
No one in particular
loves me today
In his gray armchair
at dawn, with coffee and cat
Scent lingers in cloth
Slippers empty of feet
A cane leans against the chair
How much of him in me
My body breathes here
in the home of pine and glass
he dreamed, built, and died in
Claudia Kessel works as a grant writer and musician in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her poetry has been published in Richmond Magazine as a finalist in the 2021 Shann Palmer Poetry Contest, awarded by James River Writers, in the 2024 Poetry Society of Virginia anthology, and in various literary journals.
