Poetry by Barbara Siegel Carlson
The heart’s fingerprints are everywhere.
Richard jackson
From somewhere in the city
come the colorful pungency
of oils and spices,
the scent of wet stone,
a woman perspiring
in her high heels that click by,
and the smoke a squinty-eyed man
exhales as he taps
his ashes to the ground
a few feet from the doorway
where a raw-cheeked woman sleeps
under a blanket of particles
near a piece of mooncake some pigeons
& sparrows are sharing.
Barbara Siegel Carlson‘s third book of poems What Drifted Here was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2023. Her previous books are Once in Every Language and Fire Road. A chapbook Between the Hours was published in 2022. She teaches in Boston and lives in Carver, Massachusetts.
