Natalie Easton is a 31-year-old poet who has more useless knowledge than she knows what to do with. She can catch a fly 9 times out of 10 and tell you all about rare birds and the precarious state of the health of frogs, but she can’t do math. Her poetry has appeared at The Barefoot Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and the Wild Goose Poetry Review. Visit her website.

The View From the Dressing Room Door
By Natalie Easton

We were just putting on a show.
On the ground, leaves curl in like cramping girls.
In a moment you’ll understand why;
they are shut against the word mother
carved in the head of cradled consequence.
They rock like empty bassinets,
like eyelids closing against the confusion
of unpredictable weather.

We are so insistent
with our carry-home dawns, our red-jacketed evenings.
I will love you for your findings
when they so align with mine that we can reason
before we pull our shearling boots on
for the next brave trek into the disarming air
of awaited spring.

We never stop looking at the peripherals
and focus in: the Vs of geese become the teeth
of an unzippered jacket; the white roofs the inactivity
of listening to familiarity.

Time only pretends; the clouds are stirring
like sharks pulling currents above our heads
int light-lapping halos
filled with double-dutch examples tripping you into our bed
where no one moves. We lie and listen
to our bodies turn off like sirens into separate streets,
then follow the temperature of our skins
into our memories of each final season.

The trees wave at us bare before they fill our heads
with obliterating ice and we dream
of cancer and a thousand futures
and all of our reasons:
We were just putting on a show.