Susan Kay Anderson

Nonpareil

She keeps a failed language 

in her mouth behind her teeth.

(mint air so warm from the field

seeps past the door and on into the house)

Sees the quiet

because the quiet is loud.

See how it is all built of words

careful blurs into the distance

with no meaning up close

only from far away with eyes

two candles in a window

with snow outside like blankets.

But that is winter.  Turn away

from that scene. Turn again.

Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon's Umpqua River Basin. Author of Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (memoir, 2021) and Mezzanine (poetry, 2019), both from Finishing Line Press. Her poems are in recent issues of Barrow Street, Heron Tree, Interim, and Ocean State Review. She reads poetry submissions for Lily Poetry Review and Quarterly West.