KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Ann Wood Fuller
House For Sale
Suffer these ruins of what never was.
----Richard Howard
This house once served its hosts
like guests,
giving its best room, its two good chairs
cheerfully.
The walls gave back a rich response
from the cedar growing once
and held in the warmth, held up the roof.
Aloof
in its wooden trim,
this house breathed in
the gulf's salt-air for years.
It listened to each bird-complaint in the eaves.
Now behind each window-dark face,
this house waits like a body waits,
wanting
to be claimed. Oh, I feel old,
held
here in these childless rooms.
How well each post slips into its beam,
the floors broomstung, the tongue
obedient in its groove.
Outside, the night grows
grey.
A young scrub oak
knocks
against the clapboard like a hand.
The Last Resort
How easily the Cayman sky
opened up its dawn, conch-pink,
and we, having already had our first drink
out on our lanai,
the heat-crowned palms fanned-out,
the sun-beaten
bougainvillea, a height
just right
for us to go about
without our clothes----
and you, already bored with the shells, the native straw, the shops
of GeorgeTown, dropped
like the breadfruit drops into a chair and closed
yourself so quickly with your robe, against the leeward wind,
which must be why
while we were inside we
never felt the heat on our sunburned skin
through all those sticky nights
when even the furniture would sweat
and you kept
walking the sandy floor to spite
the bed, but somehow through it all I didn't mind
the wind
or, for that matter, the sand----
how easily it filled a wound, one grain at a time.
Adam and Eve in Florida
The evening blinks with lightning bugs and rain.
The fennel softens on its stem
and crowns of cabbage palm and hickory
obscure the milky moon. Humidity,
like glue, confines us to our chairs. We sweat
and rock. The heat: a language that the whippoorwill
repeats, repeats. The garden smells of mold,
and air plants look like demons in the oaks.
The wicker gives and takes and creaks while frogs
ignite their throats tonguing jeweled insects
off the tusks of fronds, and isolated
lamps of houses burn behind their curtained
rooms. In this momentary equipoise,
in air too still to stir, we watch the poison
glisten in the snakes.
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 7 isolated acres in the old Florida woods.