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Finger Food
The harder the shell, the sweeter the nut.
That's what you kept saying.
I broke my best nutcracker.
In desperation,
I banged my hammer,
Bashed my knuckles,
Ran out of fingers—
A near-disaster on my hands
By the time I stopped listening to you.
Thorny and tough outside, the cactus is sweet and tender inside.
Well, here we don't go again, baby.
I know all I need to know about cactus.
If I'm ever lost in the desert,
Out of water,
Out of my mind,
Miraculously not out of gloves,
I might give in to your temptations.
But for now, I'll stick to fruit I can trust
Alone with my hands.
The Heaviness Is All
The Old Woman meteorite at the Desert Discovery Center
is about the size of the base of a healthy snowman.
But it weighs three tons. Solid black metal.
We walk around it.
We've never seen anything this dense.
It makes me think of light—
the lack of light I see in your eyes.
It makes me think of hurt.
Time alone will not snowball healing.
Look how mere seeing fails to inspire our believing.
We have to touch, to try to budge this leaden Old Woman
before we see for ourselves the veracity
of what all the signs have been saying.
Peggy Landsman's work has been published in online and print literary journals and anthologies,
including Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C&R Press), Spindle, The Muse Strikes Back (Story Line Press),
Bridges (Indiana University Press), and Iodine Poetry Journal. Much of her work has been translated
into Romanian and published bilingually in the Romanian journal, Contemporary & Literary Horizon.
Her poetry chapbook, To-wit To-woo, is available from FootHills Publishing. She has also published
a contemporary romance novel, Passion's Professor (Midnight Showcase), under the pen name Samantha
Rhodes. She has a website at Landsman.
Email: Peggy Landsman
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