HEATHER SAGER

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

Summer Love (Chicago)

I’ve been riding the rails all summer
The people in the L car nodding heads around me
Even though we don’t talk
I feel they are
keeping me company
as they converse and share their thoughts

In a great green field a wave of bodies comes together
Music and green and windy dirt
And the sky sweet blue sweet
I say,
Let us each join our own beloved stranger
as each to our own beloved self is lost and seeking

A reveler nods off in the bathroom
of the commuter station
as a girl takes a selfie
and applies lipstick

I return to the festival
geese formations tug the eyes
of we the landlocked
the hope-lost festival-goers
who come
to be embraced
in ritual
and sweat dirt and
strobes of colored light

Celebration

The large blue pigeon
roosting on my front porch

gives my young son and I
cause to celebrate.

Running around
with our camera

we smile
at this plump creature

who shelters
on our concrete lip of the world.

We watch all morning
Our bellies full

of Sunday pancakes.
Visiting our sunny porch

we fill our eyes
with this common pigeon

whose beady eyes
present a window

to a soul unknowable.
Tomorrow he makes his grand flight.