View to the Back
Not a picture but a picture window
at the far end of a living room stuffed
plush armchairs not chairs but nests
for a clutch of eggs not eggs but
ice cream that my mother let me eat
for breakfast not breakfast but bed
time when I muffled the reading
lamp under my pillow not the pillow
but smoke from the brown bruise
of scorched ticking not scorched
but faded like my picture of living
in the deep green room where
Mother sits at night to read the Times.
Marion Brown, who lives in Yonkers, has published Tasted and The Morning After Summer, with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse, the Women’s Review of Books, Kestrel, and DIAGRAM among others. She serves on Slapering Hol Press’s Advisory Committee and the National Council of Graywolf Press.