Poetry
“Aubade at New Orleans on Two Occasions (Divination Poem IV)”
By Wesley Scott McMasters
In the French Quarter
we danced happily
at first, but soon you
tired of me and the smokiest
jazz rooms I could find. I woke
to find you gone without a word.
Ten years later in the
same French Quarter,
I wake in a different room
in the middle of a vision
with no one next to me.
I open the curtain; the door
opens behind me, and I turn to
see my wife enter with coffee for the two of us.
“Divination Poem V”
By Wesley Scott McMasters
first it is the Madonna
my wife places in the
living room next to a
precarious stack of books
it is nearly a year before the
statue is knocked over by the
cord of a vacuum—apparently
my wife carefully places the
hands still united in prayer
next to a rosary from her
grandmother and on top of a
book of poems about the ocean
the next occasion is stranger
it is St Barbara this time
patron saint of miners
weeks after my wife
leaves her job helping
zinc miners fight the
insurance companies
to pay for the chemo
for their sick wives
we find Barbara’s hands
in a corner somewhere far
from her spot on the dresser
no sign of struggle or fall
her hands are placed in a
drawer for safekeeping
it is when St Lucy rips
off her hands suddenly
while we are sleeping
when we finally listen:
you can only carry so much
Wesley Scott McMasters
Wesley Scott McMasters lives with his wife, Caroline, and their dog, Poet (who came with the name, they swear), just within sight of the Great Smoky Mountains. He is the author of The Bathtub Madonna (Riverdog Press, 2022) and In Which My Lover Tells Me about the Nature of Wild Things (Mammoth Books, 2020). You can find his work around the internet and in various print publications, like Pennsylvania English. He is an editor for Red Flag Poetry and the Red Branch Review.