Sample Poems by Andrea Fry

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The Bottle Diggers

Away from the highway in the thick of leaves
we stumble on rubble, the foundation of a house.
We scan the field for its onetime dump,

for the subtle rise of hidden shapes, ground draped
like the top of a pie. We walk through ourselves,
search for bottles from another time, with boots and sticks

we loosen the dirt from glinting heels and collars
that stud the soil. Driven to find just one vessel intact,
we sink to our knees to free each glimmer.

Earth rises around us as if we, too, were broken glass
or sullied china cups with yellow stems prancing around
the rim. One by one we free each remnant and hold it up

to catch the sun. We keep digging, but never find
a bottle whole. So we name this place heartbreak dump.
We name this place always meeting ourselves.

We find the blob-top, cold and fat with emerald lip.
A tapered gin that leans like an amber mummy.
The bromo with a syrupy essence, sealed with scab of cork.

The punt mark's seamless body, spilling down
to a jagged base, prized
for that fundamental scar.

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Catechism

Jenny Darsey said it was fact:
they nailed his feet and hands
to the tree.

Then some guy stabbed him
with a spear and blood gushed.

There was blood everywhere,
Jenny said. Like she was there.

Then she ran to kick the ball.
I held my breath.

When Jenny came back, her face
had changed.

Then lowandbehoed, she said,
just like that, lowandbehoed,
He rose from the dead!

I gasped, then chomped down hard
on my sagging stick of red licorice.

---

The Magic Carpet

-for Rob

They threw out that old rug about the same time
they threw out the marriage.
I found it coiled, leaning against our house like a drunk.

It was kinked in the middle, the water meter propping it up.
Steadying its bent neck, I hauled it into the sun,
then lowered it into a rectangle of perfect noon.

On my knees I unrolled it, spread it out,
coaxing its crooked spine down flat.
I studied its weave,

four shades of brown pinned by a grid of black tracks.
My brother Rob wandered over
and I whispered to him just what this rug was.

My voice was soft and slow as if beginning a story.
I told him we would fly first to "Alba Kurky"
then to "Bucking Ham Palace" and then to "ASIA."

I discovered my embellishments as I uttered them,
felt my power grow as my voice became bolder,
my visions of distant lands sharper.

I beckoned Rob closer, signaling we were ready.
He listened hard. We sat down
on the rug to wait for takeoff.

Later, when the sun had dropped below the horizon,
and its rose sheen backlit our world,
we got up and went into our house,


sure that it had happened, that we'd invoked magic.
Because we had left with the night sky still
glowing and the peepers still speaking.

Because nothing was finished.

---

Motility

Mom said you'd be sleeping at your office,
which left us feeling odd--like when
my paramecium died at the science fair,
or when the fish swallowed Rob's hook.
Then she said you'd moved to be near the water.
So we imagined you standing next to a puddle;
then we could say, as if diligently reciting
a line from a child's book: Dad is near the water.
On weekends, we saw what it really meant:
you lived in your bathing suit;
you actually liked low tide and muck,
which smelled like gym class.
Then Mom moved us near the water, too.
We were floating toward you
like the amoeba in Steve's science project--
to envelop you in our vacuole.
But you never allowed yourself to be
enveloped: Sunday evenings you drove us
home, hugged us goodbye, still wearing
pants caked with sandworm crud.
Once, we found an old dinghy, piled in
and rowed outside the cove to find you.