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Keija Kaarina Parssinen
 
Previously, my poems have appeared in Monday Night Literary Review, Her Circle Ezine, the Nassau Weekly Literary Supplement (Princeton University), and The Country Mouse, where my poem Repentance for a Feminist Reading of On the Road received first prize in last summer's contest. This fall, I will begin work on my MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I will be a Truman Capote Fellow and student editor of the annual fiction contest. I have studied poetry with Susan Wheeler, Marjorie Welish, Toi Derricotte, Charles Martin, and Bob Holman.
 
 

Afternoon at the Blue Hangar

 

I.

 

Scent of gardenia

            And oh, and oh

brimming garden:

Mexican hat, lobelia, bachelor buttons

            And oh

delicious heat

rutilanting my skin

            like your tomatoes

            sweet cat camouflaged

by grasses

hot smell of life, ripening the mint

deepening the purple

of eggplant, beet

 

II.

 

Is it ash or elm?

            The helicopters will tell

Spokes coptering,

We whir and woosh

            You wonder what flag to fly:

“Biking is fun!” or “You can do it too!”

At Airport & Springdale,

three honks & a wave

three lady bikers, a fantasy of legs

hinging in unison

our collective loveliness

fueling the helium

sunshine!

 

III.

 

            Your bell trilling our arrival

at the Blue Hangar,

messy flowerbeds of clothes

            we till with our hands

turning over the color

to yield:

green shorts, linen tunic, pink dress!

            A skirt like grandma’s wallpaper

a forest of abandoned trophies

we should buy them to celebrate

            the triumph of our day

            We win! We live!

 

Home  //  ISSUE 5