Unshod Quills » Magdalen Powers http://www.literaryorphans.org/rookery/UnshodQuills A Pandemic Journal of Arts and Letters Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:45:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.38 Magdalen Powers http://www.literaryorphans.org/rookery/UnshodQuills/2012/06/23/magdalen-powers-2/ http://www.literaryorphans.org/rookery/UnshodQuills/2012/06/23/magdalen-powers-2/#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2012 17:45:56 +0000 http://unshodquills.com/?p=1717 On the themes of leftovers and Amelia Earhart

The Egg

At the back
of my father’s
refrigerator is a

jar containing alcohol
and a twenty-
year-old egg

from Norma, né
Norm, a budgie
of evidently uncertain

sex, who one
day laid it
in the sound

hole of a
Hopalong Cassidy banjo
that hung on

the far side
of the kitchen,
cementing Norma’s femininity,

and the tenacity
of my father’s
remembering—a reliquary

of potential, a
reminder of what
might have been.

 

My Mother, Approaching Takeoff

We, your offspring, are Officially Concerned.
You seem increasingly foreign to us,
like someone we have heard of
but do not know. We sense
you are moving beyond us,
that your hidden agenda
will take you somewhere
we can’t follow, that one day
all that will remain are sightings,
false rumors, the odd fragment of bone.

Author Biography

Magdalen Powers writes, edits, and teaches in Salem, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Spork, Southeast Review, Monkeybicycle, Alice Blue Review, and 5_Trope, among other places.

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