Maureen Alsop's poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including Barrow Street, MARGIE, Typo Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and Texas Review, among others. She is the recent recipient of the Milton Kessler Memorial Award in Poetry and winner of Poetry West's Eleventh Muse Poetry Contest. Her first full collection of poems Apparition Wren is forthcoming late in 2007.
Spinnaker Shift
Twice this winter I deceived myself. The doves,
hard worn by the desert saltpan had vanished. But I woke
to hear them cooing on the roof like little gurgling drums.
It was as if I'd sailed through a portrait of a storm—staggered sails
slapped backward through ink-spun shipyards—and a tremulous
flutter of feathers hung in the air. Later
darkness fell across the afternoon; the milk-gray sky
swirled and wrinkled. That same winter
drops of snow wrested themselves
down into a sheet of pewter. There comes a deathtime
when the world makes strange. And love winces
before her water breaks.
