Two Poems by Priscilla Frake

Smokey Mountain Winter

Sometimes it’s a ghost landscape.
Valleys in fog. Only branches
left to point to anything, abandoned

masts and broken spars. Everything
drowned or gray. Peaks faded from
gleam. Mist in my thoughts. Insinuation

of wisp & synapse, thickening
to a dull wall. Impasse of sight,
impasse of will. No direction

but up or down. Small wonder
I’ve lost my way, without distance
to aim me. What spell will call forth

an eye to help me see? Or haul me blind
through this curious colorless dawn
to find and claim what ails me?

Just to Ask

Who owns the world? Who owns, let’s say,
these green tomatoes— do I?—or does
the grackle or the small horned worm,
who’s creeping up the hairy vine,
a millionaire of stems and leaves?
Who owns the yard, its fringe of green,

its trembling watercolor eye?
I pay the taxes, clean the pool
and buy the springy shoots on sale
and yet— what title do I have?
A rat lives in the Sago palm.
Doves perch along the wall and grieve.

If ownership were based on need
the mockingbird would beat me out;
his brood lives in the largest shrub.
But still, I lay my claim of love
among all other claims and needs
and shamble off to stake the vines.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Anthology publications include Weaving the Terrain: 100 Word Southwestern Poems, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Women. Period. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.