Poems by Crystalee Calderwood

Ars Poetica

Naked words
seep from my fingers, drip from my pen,
pile on top of each other,
slide skin on skin.
The letters entwine
legs through legs,
grasp together hands.

My poetry whispers
with each stroke of the pen,
screams, bold against flat white sheets,
shakes your brain, your body
over and over again.

This is my spell, this swirl of black
figures making love on a white plain.
This is my seduction,
feeding you truths, calling them lies,
pulling you deeper and deeper in.

The Water Will Eat Me

I knew this at a young age.
The water will swallow me whole,
pull me into its bottomless mouth,
feast on my fear of it.

So I stayed away from lakes, oceans,
rivers, splashes of ponds in the woods.
At the beach, I stayed on shore,
rarely allowing my feet to touch
the rush of wave that broke on land.
My stomach sunk on bridges over rivers,
my head spun even after I closed my eyes.
In an airplane over the Atlantic,
I pulled the shade down so I couldn’t sense
the infinite blue beneath me.

Water churns up treasures from its darkness.
It can see through itself, always confident,
always reflecting what I could be.

Once, I walked into the ocean,
a friend in the water guiding me
with her arms outstretched,
a hand in my trembling hand.
I dipped my feet, legs, up to my shoulders
into the ocean’s cool, fresh confidence.
I stayed long enough to feel its strength
shake through my bones, then
returned to shore, my skin saturated
with salt, my eyes open and large.

Crystalee Calderwood has an MFA in Creative Writing with a dual emphasis in Poetry and Writing for Children. Her poetry has appeared in several journals, including “The Triangle: The Journal of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society” and “The Susquehanna Review”. Her picture book Angeline Jellybean can be ordered on Amazon.com.