Two Poems by Maureen Wallner

Two for one on this fine fall Wednesday!

Our second post today come to us from Maureen Wallner of Moline, IL.  Here is what she had to say about her two poems:

The first is through the lens of youth: a first home with its ideals and its sadness at differences, and being so far away from all that is familiar. The second has eyes opened, but not without nostalgia, seeing home for what it is and what it isn’t.

So here are Maureen's two poems, "67 Tolstraat" and "53rd Street":


67 Tolstraat


Day bed against wallpaper
gray with yellow sunflowers,
three steps to books and bones,
a virgin stethoscope,
blue gas flame beckoning in a fireplace.

Floor covered in our steps
on gray linoleum,
gray as ever-staring faces,
windows framing ever-rainy skies.

Bathroom separated by a shower curtain
two steps from the kitchen table,
soup bowls bulging in Belgian vegetables,
hands slipping in soapy bubbles.
Our deep porcelain sink under a rented hot water heater.

So many steps to Antwerp
to our first apartment,
bodies fused on a day bed
early Sunday mornings.



53rd Street


Exiting to 53rd Street.
Seconds flash, a vacuum,
and it is yesterday,

maples’ elbows by a roadside,
sleeping horse barns on Cote Vertu,
crunching gravel in an Austin back seat,
electric posts upside down giant stick men,
to bubby and gramps
on Hutchison.

Cote Vertu scraped
away as mold
for strip malls, condos,
asphalt smeared,
lamp poles blinding symmetric streets.

Here again,
bucking 74, a fanning highway
past a lonely farm house.
Solitary picture.
Like shoulders sagging into corn fields,
a steam shovel
waiting.
A spot for new cement foundations
to prop stores, roll squeaky rusted shopping carts.

No vacancy
for winter wheat.

 
 
BIO: Maureen Wallner: From Illinois, USA, I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, a Canadian-American with one foot in each country. But my background in English literature and journalism is strictly from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. I am also a writer: of non fiction, fiction, creative non fiction and poetry, some of it published, some winning contests, some placing in them. My first novel (not as yet completed) is historical fiction. “More than a Country,” it is a story of love and power and the illusion of freedom.