Today's Wednesday Essay...is a Wednesday Poem!

Awful April
by Laurie Lessen-Reiche

It is gone now with its awful
births and hesitancies---its
Amusement Park ride jerks and whiplashes,
its plummets.
It has slipped over the horizon out of sight
like a skier on his disappearing descent down the Matterhorn.
It's gone now and I am glad.
It left, a cry-baby, with its suitcase full of rain.
I feel no remorse,
won't turn around and call it back, in fact,
I'm relieved to be free of its infuriating kvetching,
its pushy mooching off my heart:
a hungry month, a naughty month,
I might even go so far as to say,
a hopelessly psychopathic month.
I'm done with it---
now it is May! the new birds and bees
move into the air in a downright Dionysian jubilation,
like liberated Munchkins they are reveling in the witch's liquidation,
spinning down sidewalks, bouncing off supple
branches, French-kissing stranger roses in front of the cheering
blades of grass whose green cheeks blush even greener,
tumbling and somersaulting through the swimming pool-blue air---
all taking one big collective breath
as willow seeds fall:
lucky-star confetti anointing us all!
~


Laurie S. Lessen-Reiche is a fulltime person living fully for writing in Petaluma, California. She has published widely in magazines such as The Princeton Arts Review, Kingfisher, The Southern Poetry Review and The California Quarterly." She is the recent winner of Lilith's Magazine's 2006 Charlotte Newberger Poetry Award. She loves talking to people about all things, especially poetry, philosophy, literature, and politics, and welcomes any and all email from other writing, painting, singing, dancing, stressing, lolling, strangers! Email Laurie at: p.reiche@comcast.net