Three Poems by Mary Paulson

"Second Chances," "Pastoral," and "At the Party"

Photo by Robert Thiemann

Second Chances

These long walks,
city views, summers spent on
park benches reading,
contemplating, waiting for something
to happen. As if the
next thought, the very
next encounter will be the thing
to catapult me forward, over
and past the ruins
I made of last year. As if the
next thing to come along will be
a wish granted just to me,
a peace offering I’ll accept with
humble bowing thank you, thank you,
I’ll do better this time.

Pastoral

Gin stink burns my nose
but I like the grace of smooth glass in my hands,
the old fashioned
tilt-a-wheel giddiness of the third drink.

Summer weekend nights
in the backseat of your big red Ford,
leather, sweat
sticky on the back of my thighs
when we kiss.

You rub your hands
all along my waist and sides
but I refuse to let you tease secrets
out from under my skirt.

You have two cousins,
girls my age. Luce and Mary Belle steal clove cigarettes
from your uncle’s store. We smoke them
behind the abandoned red brick building by the reservoir,
sweet dirt taste
left along the rim of my lower lip.

All night we play question and answer games,
guzzling warm beer
daring each other to go a little farther
into the woods by the cul-de-sac.
We play tag, sending high-pitch screeches into treetops,
running mad,
with only our shoes on.

Out late, two hours past curfew
I know I’m already grounded.

By the end of June, colors are soft
as laundered cotton. When you’re on top of me
I see color behind my eyes,
a field of pastels
seen as if from the window of a speeding train—

Blurring, coming together, moving
apart, turning rose, gold, apricot.
Glint leaps like sunlight off a mirror
when I try to focus on your face.

You’re laughing. I can’t see
your mouth but I like the sound—
how it cascades into the rush
of pinks and the velocity of the train.

At the Party

We’re standing
in the living room

in small packs of restless
energy. In between the

peripatetic speech patterns
of party goers, trailing

the aftermath of small
explosions of laughter, I hear

the atoms of the house splitting
and outside, dark fauna

sighing in the lush,
hush of this glowing purple

late night. I’m badly
wired. Doctors call it

dissonance, exposure to
too low frequencies,

undulating wavelengths, bio-
rhythms compelling headaches,

vertigo and a bad,
rabid heart rate.

Can’t you hear that?
There’s something—

a silver mercury
babbling brook or

elephants purring like
cats. Irregular sound waves

pinballing inside my
ear. There’s a deep-sleep

dream moving sluggishly beneath
the floorboards. Eerie

displacements happening all over
the world tonight—

I hide myself in conversation.

We are standing
in the living room

in small packs of restless
energy.

Mary Paulson’s writing has appeared in multiple journals most recently in VAINE Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fevers of the Mind, The Gyroscope Review, Ephemeral Elegies, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Ephemeral Elegies and The Disappointed Housewife. She has poems forthcoming in the Willowdown Books Anthology: Looking In, Looking Out and in the journals, Door Is A Jar, Down in The Dirt, The Opiate and The Closed Eye Open. Her chapbook, Paint the Window Open was published in 2021 by Kelsay Press. She lives in Naples, Florida.