Peace is Rippling

The apple trees say,

Dance with us,

but I cannot hold so still borne
toward entropy.

My mouth, for instance, was held open and
cotton pressed into the corners, and I was
told not to swallow as the tooth was sealed.

Take as another example
the pavement. Or lucidity
in the face of tragedy.

Always we are trying to stay dry.

The apple trees in the field can hold
onto their chaos. We turn it to ballet—
though the rhythmic is just a pause, the
pirouette an encapsulation

of energies like those preceding grief.

A tear falling to water undoes
placidity in perfect motion…

So those trees say,

Dance with us,

but I am already
frozen. Waiting
for the infinitely ordered
cacophony to arrive.

Autumn Poem

The wind is rattling the city’s bones,
heaving itself against lean windows and
making with newspapers and plastic bags
temporary spirits for leading us
through rush hour. The wind is scouring the streets.

Sometimes amidst unblown brick and steel just
ears give the gusts away—but even still,
aloft at precarious desks, you can
feel the stir of October, how the door
will resist, how the lungs fill like balloons.

Rachel Bennett was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1979, and moved to New York City in 2001, after participating in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Irish Writing Program in Dublin, working in a nursing home in Ecuador, and earning a B.A. in English from Grinnell College. Her poems have won two Whitcomb Prizes judged by Gerald Stern and James Galvin, respectively, and appeared in Buffalo Carp, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Rhapsoidia, elimae, Alba, The Big Toe Review, zafusy, Adagio Quarterly Review, Laika Poetry Review, and Blood Lotus; two poems included in Rhapsoidia were 2006 Pushcart Prize nominees. In July 2007, Miss Bennett was invited back to Dublin to give a reading and talk to current students in the Irish Writing Program. She currently lives in Brooklyn, develops programs for the Medicare Rights Center, and teaches poetry in New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Email: Rachel Bennett

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