Three Poems by Andrea McBride: Tempus Fugit, Tiger, Mere Inches

Three Poems

By Andrea McBride

Tempus Fugit

Hadn’t seen her in years.
She’d gained weight.
Her baby’s eleven.
My, how time flies.

I had another child
a boy-he’s eight
I told her
as she yanked
a scraggly gray
from my head.

It didn’t belong there.
She said.

I took her round face in my hands
and as if she were time itself
demanded
of her black eyes
Where did you go?

Her fingers that still held
the gray parted
I released my grip on her
because she had no answer

We watched
the gray
flutter.
We watched it fly.

Tiger

I brush back
your gray coat
and uncover
dark stripes
just beneath

tonight
your eyes glow green
and make bigger
any light there is
in your jungle

I dangle string
you crouch
and with a perfectly
timed pounce attack
in mid-flight

you claw the trunk
of my old brown couch
as I sit
you turn to me
as if to ask

what could have been
and I wonder then,
do you resent me
for naming you
after your wild cousin?

Mere Inches

He placed his index finger on the window. It was 10 below outside. If I had been standing in the yard, the snow would have risen above my waist. But, we were inside. The Christmas tree was alive with colorful lights. Ribboned presents waited underneath. My belly was full from eating the chocolate candies my mom set out on a round, white plate on the coffee table.

He said to me as I looked up at his thick finger resting against the windowpane, Just think, Andi, inches from where I am touching, the air is freezing. Just inches away, our bare fingers would be frostbitten.

I looked out at the cold white snow, at the icicle daggers aiming toward the cement front porch cleared of snow.

I wrapped my small hand around my dad’s big finger, and it was warm. I placed my whole face against the windowpane, tasted the plain cool glass. I shivered because mere inches kept me from the terrible cold.

Andrea McBride writes poetry in Wesley Chapel, Florida where she lives with her husband and two children. Her work has been published in several editions of Sandhill Review, and in the online journals, Bolts of Silk and work to a calm. One of her prose poems will also appear in Pennine Ink Magazine.

Copyright 2013 © Andrea McBride. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.