Selling Pencils
My pretend future involved
selling lead pencils door-to-door.
Most days,
I lost myself in birdsong,
the moods of sky, the stately sycamores.
I often looked up instead of forward,
tripping while watching the parrots flash green.
Once I fell into someone’s garden.
Afterward, my coat smelled
of ruptured tomatoes and dirt.
I rinsed the ash from my hands
in a nearby fountain.
All I wanted was to work outdoors.
An office was a cage, me the rabbit
ready for the spit.
There were days
I didn’t want to speak to another human,
so I only knocked on doors where
I knew the occupant wasn’t there.
My shoe leather suffered fiercely,
repaired by cardboard, leaves, and blisters,
but no mind.
I received the stares of others
as bouquets of compassion,
whether they were intended as such or not.
I often thought of myself as Moses, strolling
along the Ganges.
I heard God’s soft voice telling me
to climb the mountains.
Why I thought those things,
I really cannot say.
But if the answer occurs to me, I’ll use
one of my pencils to jot it down.
Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Cantos, Drunk Monkeys, Doubly Mad, El Portal Literary Journal, Flights, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Medicine and Meaning, Midwest Quarterly and others. She was awarded second place in the 2019 Poetry Super Highway poetry contest. O’Connell was also nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer For Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.