Dunk’in Doughnuts
in the strip mall
behind it
Early Street Cemetery
dried weeds, a look
of abandonment
each of us
carries a map of the day
sometimes creased
in sorrow
or stained
with a careless drop of coffee
from a paper cut
almost thirty years ago
I’d walk here
pregnant
in my flip-flops
and the morning heat
sit on a stool at the counter
and eat two doughnuts—
one jelly, one Boston cream,
until the drunk
next to me
said loudly:
“you
know how to treat yourself
right, you know
how to treat yourself
right”
which wasn’t quite correct
as now
there’s too much
sugar in my blood
but still the hope
of a message
as I believe
some day
one of the broken
stone angels
in that graveyard
will raise her hand
to greet me
and like a sooty pigeon
ruffle up those wings
as if to fly.
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). which just won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement this year. Her blog Miriam’s Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.