Guest Author: Meghan Tutolo/Three Poems

Poem One
Nature Poem

We all see it the same,
brown leaf to first snow,
the broken-hearted sunset.

All this nature is thick & milky
as cottage cheese on our tongues.

The metaphor sleeps in green,
in the mud-scope of a river bed.

Someone tell me it is natural,
this red wind-fall inside me,

the way I want to scream
at the lone tree in my yard

it scrapes its branches on my window
while no one looks inside


Poem Two
Myra Ellen

She wasn’t breathing right.
Her aqua cage was too quiet.
It was midnight, and all over Western, PA,
other hamsters were spinning their plastic wheels,
stuffing their cheeks with seeds.

I called for my mother, who whined
for ten minutes from her desk
before arriving hip-stance in my doorway.
What’s wrong with her?—
she asked in that mother way.

I sat up stiff against my headboard,
the opposite end of the room,
stared at the paneling of my wall,
not the cage or the soft body inside.
Myra wheezed from her cedar bed.

My mother began to cry,
her black, black mascara
at the wrinkled corners of her eyes,
shook her head of it all.
She took Myra in her hands, stroked
the matted fur down around her face.

I imagine if she cried for my father,
she may have looked this way,
only nothing to coddle,
only me twenty-two miles away
with someone else’s Kleenex.

I asked her to tuck me in, turn off the light,
take the cage out of my room.
The air was too thin with the sounds
of small things dying around me.
The crickets outside shut off.


Poem Three
On E

I stop at a Sunoco in Blawnox
to the smell of gasoline & candy bars
the dry-rot musk of a small suburb
with one main road and the Skylight Lounge.
I have a long ride home
and all I want is a cup of coffee
with those little Amaretto creamers
and the lanky grey-haired clerk
picks up his head from a book
“Yeah, that’s just been made”
he tells me
as I pull out the House Blend
by its maroon handle
and begin to pour.
I smile at him, this fifty-something man.
It’s ten o’clock at night
and I can’t stop thinking
even when I get in my car
what a sad little place
a guy with a book in his lap:
and the only thing going for him
is fresh coffee.

Meghan Tutolo has just finished her MFA at Chatham University, but isn't sure that the degree makes her a poet yet. She works at a local AAA, where she dreams of being somewhere else. (The maps don't help!) In her spare time, she loves hard, reads up on the apocolypse, and paints the ocean.