Joan Fiset

five poems from After

 

Missed

severance, a sky
no one in sight
becomes afternoon
where you left your thimble

across the way he
rides past
in a carriage
centuries from here

 

 

 

Bits

yellow singe
I wore a skirt
all morning the leaving
and hopeful
as though
grace stood near
hum of the bees
grows louder
stops my ears and sings

 

 

 

Snap

and called
then racing up and down
threads pull
close to blue
and wide
ice arrives
clip, clop
to frost
to pins
geometric burst
reeled in

 

 

 

Face About to Turn

light blue net
to receive what will fall
when eyes

arrive and the hill
where bells sound
random gongs

while cows walk
and the hill
has always been the story

in the pause
in stone in marble
until this breath

light blue net

 

 

 

Overseas

if the going gets rough
I will fill you in

remembered moon
in the broken marine

 

 

 

 


Joan Fiset is a psychotherapist in private practice. As a PTSD Contractor with the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs she has worked with Vietnam veterans diagnosed with Post-traumatic stress disorder. Her book of memoir prose poems, Now The Day is Over, Blue Begonia 1997, won the King County Publication Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in Under the Sun, Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, Cranky, and Switched-on Gutenberg. She collaborated with Xuan Ngoc Nguyen and Yusef Komunyaka on Washing Clothes in Moonlight: The War Stories of Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, a manuscript currently under consideration for publication.