Ann Leshy Wood | KNOT Magazine

Anne Leshy -Wood

Traps
for John

In Yankeetown my brother set his traps
upright, he walked the salt marsh every day,
researching for his Ph.D. and capped
the tin-topped cages that he built. The spray

of salt, the razored sedge; it was his career.
He gathered creatures from the tidal strand
and wondered where he'd be inside a year.
And me, with Lithium as thick as sand

inside my blood, stood unsteady in the tide
that brought him answers from its muddy flats.
I watched him dig the mussel-beds that hid
beneath the blue wave's skin, then write the stats:

"Uncertain future, vanished past" He was one
who would spend a short time to explore-- a vain
attempt. He set each trap, then walked into a lost terrain.

Tea And Ceremony
For Lester in Winter
“Among some talk of you and me”

For fire starting, you used the pages of Vogue,
Twisting the glossy ads of women’s wear
Into kindling, the scents of cedar or musk
Filling up the sooty throat of the flue.

And when it was raining, and how you loved the rain,
You’d open a cupboard of cups, each stacked
Inside their fine-bone-bottoms and make a cup of tea.
You, the proprietor of all things proper: fine linens ironed,

And tables draped in a catholic-white stare,
Flatware polished, the smells of yeast rising over there.
How many times did I come for tea and ceremony,
For a fire in the gloom of rained out afternoons?
I’d couch inside dark rooms of silk,
And pout about in sticky air.

We’d stir the hunger in our spoons,
And look through books of recipes.
O, for all the summer afternoons
You sat asleep in some hospital chair,

Bright with radium,
Frail as a holy wafer.

Ann Wood- Fuller is a Lebanese-American poet. She studied at the University of Florida earning degrees in English Literature

and did her post graduate work in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and peered journals including The Yalobusha Review and The Florida Review as well as the premier issue of Ancient City Anthology, a book of writings about Florida. Recently at the Southern Writers/Southern Writing conference at Oxford, Mississippi, she was invited to read her work and received an award for outstanding technical merit for her poem, "The Last Resort." Ann lives in a home she built on seven isolated acres in the old Florida woods.