Editor’s Note: Amazing how the poet has used the small container of a cell phone to convey so much sadness and longing.
Bus Stop
Stubborn sleet. Traffic stuck on Sixth.
We cram the shelter, soaked, strain
to see the bus, except for a man next to me,
dialing his cell-phone. He hunches,
pulls his parka’s collar over it, talks slow and low:
It’s daddy, hon. You do? Me too. Ask mom
if I can come see you now. Oh, okay,
Sunday then. Bye. Me too baby. Me too.
He snaps the phone shut, cradles it to his cheek,
holds it there. Dusk stains the sleet, minutes
slush by. When we board the bus,
that phone is still pressed to his cheek.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar was born in 1943. She grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has published poems in French and Flemish and translates American poetry into French and Dutch poetry into English. She is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019); A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007); Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997). This poem was included in A New Hunger (Ausable Press 2007) and posted here with permission of the author.
Sue Ellen says
I met Laure-Anne during the summer of ‘98, when I was living at The Frost Place and she was teaching at the poetry festival held there for a week in August. She told her students something I’ve never forgotten. She said that if anyone ever dared to ask you what you were doing during your “spare time,” you should say, “I’m working on my book of poems.”