If This Table Could Talk
the old lady would say to the little girl but there is no need for a mouth. I have felt
hired help’s callused hands rub me slow with boredom and worry which was
how I told time. Sawed and fitted out of scrap wood in a barn while fireflies
wove slow zodiacs among eternal rows of corn. I was end-of-day work.
Through the wavy kitchen screen their faces like wary strays and the eyes
of bold hunger. Crowding close around me at noon and in the evening
but everyone looked past each other and the words short and flat.
Weather corn chickens corn measles corn death corn. Facts with no reply.
There were strangers who ate the old lady’s cooking and left without a word
but one little girl who came to stay when the sun was high the air warm and thick.
Her bright vibrations in my grain. Placed feral kittens she had tamed on top
of me and talked to them like her own kind and my worn finish echoed laughter.
Much later she took me with her a long way to him and livelier back-and-forth
with their children growing up but disappeared one day like her much older kin.
My legs sawn short my leaves removed. Now I hold Audubon’s Birds of America
and poems by poets from where he goes glad to visit someone. Cats nap under me.
They all came for a while with their talk and quiet then rose and went away.
Often I never knew their hands or hips again. A few I felt the presence of so deep
their elbows and hands rested in grooves invisible. Creatures of habit and silences
who often ate while staring out of windows with no thought of ever being gone.
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A 2025 Best of the Net nominee for poetry, Ed Brickell lives in Dallas, Texas but enjoys spending a lot of time hiking in New England and elsewhere. His poems have most recently appeared in The Harvard Advocate, MORIA, Bracken, Delta Poetry Review, and others. He is working on a chapbook, Wonderful Copenhagen.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 