Two Poems
Susan McLean
Last Dance
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Rattling leaves like castanets,
the birches shimmy in the wind.
Long drought has left them brittle-skinned,
yet still they swish like old coquettes.
This isn’t their first dance with death.
They know this tune, and how it ends,
so why slow down to take a breath?
They bob and sway as dusk descends.
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Susan’s notes:​​ “As I was walking by the river one autumn, I heard a rattling behind my back and turned to see what was making the noise. It was a windy day, and the leaves of the large river birches, which had been totally desiccated by drought but had not fallen, were clattering against each other, which was the inspiration for ’Last Dance.’”
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Dislocated
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Today I’m taking off my face—
my mouth, my ears, my brows, my nose—
retaining nothing but my eyes.
Because I’m in a distant place
where nobody who knows me goes,
I’m silent as the butterflies.
I have no history to erase.
My outer margin ebbs and flows.
I’m no one that I recognize.
Today I’m taking off my name.
I’m blank. I could be anyone.
In unfamiliar light, I fade
like watercolors in a frame.
I turn transparent in the sun,
but coalesce again in shade—
exposed, unraveled, not the same,
uncertain, now I’ve come undone,
that I can ever be remade.
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Susan’s notes: “I wrote ‘Dislocated‘ when I was living in Athens, Greece, for several weeks, and spending a lot of time alone. I was trying to capture the simultaneously freeing and disorienting feeling of being unknown and in an unfamiliar place.”
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‘Last Dance‘ was originally published in The Road Not Taken (Spring 2022), and ‘Dislocated‘ was originally published in The Orchards Poetry Journal (Summer 2020).
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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.
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