Sara Kaplan

Sara Kaplan's chapbook, Moon Talk, is published with Trilobite Press.  Individual poems have also appeared in The Antioch Review, Harpur Palate, LIT 9, The Cincinnati Review, Talking River Review, The Meadow, InLand, Ruminate, The New Vilna Review, decomP magazine, Failbetter, & MO: Writings from the River.   Currently, she is an English Instructor at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas where she teaches Creative Writing, Composition, and Literature.

A Boy & His Mother

After imitating the Warshak ink prints—particularly,

the image of (obviously) a bird akimbo,

I figure I can draw more than cylinders

piled into snowmen, the house with four windows,

chimney, & lawn accessories.  Once drawing, I calm

as I do during monotony—pedagogy & laundry—

and that means I’m a certain personality—I fear

not of grackles that line the telephone wires in spring,

but of the need to hold my hand still as a surgeon.

And even now I think of the portrait & know it’s no bird:

a boy in a park trying to hold his mother.