"It is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, “Invitation”

Nina Boals is a writer from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She received an MFA in poetry at Indiana University, where she served as Editor in Chief and Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review. Her work can be found or is forthcoming from Southeast Review, Puerto del Sol, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Nina, what have you brought for us today?

Somewhere in Illinois

a string of billboards try to lure me
into buying a gun to defend
my home. I wonder how many
of us become our own intruders.
I stop in so many gas stations
and buy chips I don’t want.
Receipts shrivel all over the car mat.
At a restroom sink, I see a woman
who is my grandmother
until she turns around. Soon,
I will reach home and forget
my soda going flat in the car’s
cup holder. I will wash
the road’s funk from my body
until the water runs cold.
Before I get there, I will pass
three Peregrine falcons
perched on whatever scrawny,
arm-like thing reaches out
to them. I will watch
a horse trot through its barn’s
dark shadow. A cow
will fold its legs in a field.
I will imagine the laugh
the goats make when they lick
from a palm. I will miss the tire
blown to shards across the shoulder
and see a spare ushered out
to fill its place. I will cross
the state line into Indiana
and fumble for my door key
and wake in the morning
to walls I don’t know
are home until I blink.

----
The Laughter

Since the year you snapped, your laughter
leaks everywhere. It spills into your morning
coffee, bubbles out the garden hose, showers
the plants, slips from your wallet at the grocery checkout.
Someone always whispers a joke to you
that no one else can hear.
At the chapel, we gather with family
for a renewal of vows. Your sister-in-law
saunters up to the lectern in 5-inch wedges,
shiny, black hair billowing from a blowout.
Pink nails grip the Bible as she reads
in a voice as sweet and airy as cotton candy.
She tells us that love is patient
and kind, that it does not envy or boast.
It starts in your shoulders, a silent shaking
until it spreads through the whole of you,
spewing from your lips, echoing
in the vaulted ceiling, and pew by pew
heads pivot. We’re seated next to her sister
whose eyes have sharpened.
I pinch your arm, nudge your shin with my sole,
and you laugh harder. I’m searching for exits.
But soon we’re both trembling, gripping the pew
for support. Above us, a chained light fixture
sways with the chapel’s vibrations, straining
against its own weight. It could come loose
but it won’t. It hovers and glows.

---
Litany for Spring

To open knees
to the grass in a rush
toward green.
To wake knowing
somewhere,
a fire. To sit with the heron,
hunched there
on the ledge.
To wring your hands
in each broke-neck
creek. To lay out
an offering no animal
will touch. To fold
in the lap of a lawn
and let what may
crawl over. To clutch
snowmelt in a stinging
fist. To frown back
at the socket’s
gaping mouth.
To go on
singing without
a tunnel to echo.

You've been listening to the poems of Nina Boals on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.