Elizabeth Harrington’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Field, Nimrod, The Sun, Rattapallax, and other journals, and in an anthology about divorce (“Split Verse:  Poems To Heal The Heart”).  She was a winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, first runner-up in the dA Center for the Arts Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007, and a finalist in Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award. Her chapbook “Earth’s Milk” was first runner-up in the Main Street Rag Chapbook Poetry contest.  She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and works at a market research company in New York.

from "Earth's Milk" (published by Main Street Rag)

Ascension

There are times when something in you rises.

The sun places its hot palm on your head

as you step over muddy patches of grass

in your ruined shoes

and you hear the sky peppered with birdsong

and you ascend. Briefly, yes,

but wonderfully, forgetting even the mortal blister on your left heel.

Some believe that god is not above us

but within us.  Is us

as if we carried the stuff of stars in our DNA,

our personal deity resembling nothing

so much as reflected light.

                        ***

There are times when the heart is an empty house

with no one at the window.

You notice an ant making its wobbly way

across the kitchen floor and wonder how such a small soul

could brave such a long journey

alone.

The cat circles the dent in your pillow

and lowers herself inside its round warmth

as if she were inhabiting a halo,

and you take the found world inside of you

and you make wings of it.

 from "Earth's Milk"

Thirst

All day I’ve been making bad change

at the firecracker stand, adding up sparklers,

snakes, and roman candles on brown paper sacks,

snapping them open with a quickness

that exceeds my accuracy.

Customers have complained.

And though logic won’t, I know, be served,

I work even faster

my heart fierce as slaughter

as when I’m after something I think I want.

At the moment, it’s to slake my thirst.

Unable to leave the stand unattended, I sit

in a folding chair watching cars

pull up to a drive-in across the street, poke elbows

out of Fords, Buicks, one grass-green sedan

with a winged Mercury sparkling on its hood,

and order what they will.  I thirst for just one sip

from the tall mugs hugging frost

against their sides, for the sudden confusion

of ice cubes, for the dark splash

against a parched throat.

But mostly I thirst for what I am not,

for what I lack, the cool drink of mind

that produces the right answer every time,

this thirst, this yearning a lone note

that whistles through me

like breath across an empty bottle.