We pat every plant and valance with a broom,
flashlight the entire upstairs,
wish it were a sparrow
of harmless reputation
that invades our home, not a bat
whose sweeping silhouette darkens any sky.
We offer no sky, only plaster.
I crouch behind a chair while
it maneuvers walls, drapery and lamps
in a land where it doesn’t speak
the language, can’t read the cues.
I don’t want to have to kill it,
but before my husband and I can decide
what to do, the bat vanishes,
leaving us dumb, a still life.
We wake early the next morning
to discover a brown fur origami
no bigger than a leaf
asleep in our silk ficus. Delicately cupped
between two berry baskets
in our gloved goodwill,
it's ushered out as if on a boat to freedom
while we’re left to finger the edges of uneasy dreams—
wondering what else breathes our air,
might find residence in our closet,
shred our belongings to nest a litter,
having slipped through a crack in the window
or under the door.
isbn 1-59661-133-2
39 pages/$9
A review in Prick of the Spindle
In Security, Linda K. Sienkiewicz brings us her hard-edged vision of a domestic life in which miracles pale in comparison to the solidity and substance of real people. She blesses the world—our world—with her attention to our hopes and fears: we know these people, struggling for dignity and meaning, worrying about friends and children and marriage and money, looking for sufficient beauty to go on. These poems find that beauty again and again and offer it to us as the daily bread of poetry.
—Richard Hoffman,
author of Gold Star Road, Poems
and Half the House, Memoir
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer and artist with an MFA from Stonecoast. Her poetry has been in numerous literary reviews, her short stories appear in the Cleis Press anthology, Frenzy, A Twist of Noir and other journals, and her art in CALYX, From East to West, Tar Wolf Review, and The MacGuffin.