curse words
CATHY WITTMEYER
Spit balls piled up at her feet, the first day I sat
beside her in the only open seat of our school bus.
Curse words fingered on steamy windows
PIG! FAT! UGLY!
framed frosty light the second day
as I unfolded a note, a short poem—
pressed into my palm—a plea—a secret.
A short piece about a solitary field tree—
a thick elm alone in a bare lot of stone & grass.
Its branches like bones, the poet contrasts
the brown and the green and the grey.
The poem’s sky is overcast in dampness.
A lonely chill seeps into the reader’s skin,
until a bird lands lightly on a tender branch
still hanging on to a solitary leaf.
Cathy Wittmeyer is a poet, mother, lawyer and engineer from Buffalo, New York. She works in Austria and lives in a wooden house across the border with her adorable family. She earned her MFA in poetry from Carlow University in 2020. She is the founder of Word to Action, a climate-themed-poetry retreat and performance in Liechtenstein. See more of her work at cathywittmeyer.com