Two Poems by Maryann Corbett

Construction Season

dumpsters       hulking, arrogant, blocking alleys
toothy backhoes gnashing the sod     disgorging
earth-sour odors          trucks beeping backup     clay-red
rivering sidewalks

hardhats in forsythia yellow     blooming
wild four stories up     through a mist of maple
flowers golden-greening    & dayglo tees in
eye-pop fluorescence—

(someone wrote it     aeons gone     but it never
lets me go:      most beautiful is defined as
what you love most dearly    and oh I love this
ruckus of rising)

Elegy for the Midway Shopping Center

damaged during protests after the murder of George Floyd

Dowdy, down-market strip—
loss-leader milk and knockoff shoes;
boxy embodiment of discount shopping blues.
My workday’s homebound trip

might find me wasting an hour
spritzing a wrist with its drugstore’s perfume tester,
stroking a fabric counter’s polyester
satin, a silk flower—

dreaming, between buses.
Marooned midlife, mezzo cammin from stresses-
of-work to woes-at-home, romancing scent, sighing for dresses,
I’d seen my youthful-hippie dream of justice

bend to the whip and goad
of paystub days, while under a shaky peace
old fuses, burning down for centuries,
were waiting to explode

and did. They’ve blasted through.
Looted and window-smashed and burned
when the all-righteous rage nine breathless minutes earned
did what it had to do,

the last of the little mall
sprawled in its wounds of red graffiti.
The long lawsuits, the zoning fights, the neighborhood’s entreaty
bowed to the wrecking ball.

Emptiness now. Just go—
headed for battered hope, for grace,
still lost in transit, eyes peeled for a place
the new dream might yet grow. 

                                    —Saint Paul, Minnesota

Maryann Corbett is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In Code from Able Muse Press. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, is included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2018, and is featured on the websites of American Life in Poetry and the Poetry Foundation.