Osiris in My Coffee Shop

Osiris in My Coffee Shop
By Shannon Connor Winward
I look up from my papers
as always, I am unprepared for you

the way I tend to grow towards you
my worth sinking and rising on your entrance

and it is only in this instant
the word sustainable on the page in flames

that I remember this dream
and find it curious

I dressed you in an overcoat.
You are ever out of place

my sister-brother where I am
your brown arms naked heart embracing full

me scrambling to pick up pieces—
silly. Could you just imagine? You,

come to sow anything
in my Mid-Atlantic winter.

* * *
Shannon Connor Winward is the author of the Elgin-award winning chapbook, Undoing Winter. Her poems have appeared in The Monarch Review, Qu, Analog, The Pedestal Magazine, Literary Mama, Strange Horizons and Eternal Haunted Summer, among others. In between writing, parenting, and other madness, Shannon is also a poetry editor for Devilfish Review and founding editor of Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal.

Where do you get the ideas for your poems?
Dreams, observation, a need for catharsis or resolution, the desire to capture a moment or to explore a given theme, form, or idea.

Midsummer

Midsummer

by Shannon Connor Winward

June is living on without you,

wet with mist and wanting open

the fruit of too-long winter still small

and tight against the vine.

  

The plans I made in tatters, our tomorrows

woven in my lap

to swaddle daughters

it doesn’t take a husband to make a life.

  

Hope is kicking in my belly, blood singing in my womb

I can give myself to long, warm nights.

  

July has been weeping for us

stars drawn up behind pinked clouds

but Mars is brushing against the Earth

nearer than fifty-thousand years.*

  

This pain of children breaks your composure

my heart aches like an old battle wound.

  

Magic is going to happen

the planets know it, and so do I.

August is moving on without you, and I think,

my darling, I am going, too.

* * *

  

 *On August 27, 2003, Earth and Mars converged at a distance of 56 million km – the closest perihelic opposition since Earth’s prehistory.

* * *

Shannon Connor Winward is an author of literary and speculative fiction and poetry. Her writing has appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, Eternal Haunted Summer, and Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine, among others, and was  awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Delaware Division of the Arts Emerging Artist Fellowship.  Her first chapbook, UNDOING WINTER, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June, 2014.

Where do you get the ideas for your poems?

Ideas for poetry come from all kinds of places.  Many of mine are discovered in dreams, or in myths that resonate with what I'm going through.  Others are born from challenges, such as wanting to write a poem in a particular form, or to a certain theme.  It's important to always be open to inspiration - and if inspiration is slow in coming, to go out and look for it.