Another Morning at 4 a.m. with RA​

Issue 18

          golden shovel after David Wagoner’s “Diary”

Body sharply moving, lit from arthritis, I lurch off the bed, wondering if my toes at
sandals’ edge will throb red and full all Monday,
bones and cartilage bitten by disease as if hit by Artemis’s arrows, meeting at dawn
for another campaign against my recollections of pleasure in walking, strides I  
loved in the grass, greeting lacy Japanese maple leaves where squirrels climbed
to crack their sunflower seeds, walking faster into
the wind, feeling I could spring like the gazelle in my dreams, and bound down my
usual three miles on the asphalt—wishing now for Daphne’s stolid wood under my skin.

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TERRIE JOPLIN won 1st Place of the Poetry Writing Contest. She taught English in public schools in Washington, Illinois, and North Carolina, and holds an MS in Education and a National Board Certification. Her poems appear in Door is a Jar, MER Online Folio, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, The Westchester Review, the anthology Recovering Greenness, and elsewhere. Terrie and her husband reside with their multi-generational family and four tuxedo cats in New York. She enjoys gardening, painting, and road trips to geographical wonders.

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