Look, mom, a hoop dancer,
my son, five, pointed
out the bus window
at Atlas poised on one knee,
arms outstretched,
the world on his back,
Rockefeller Center &
5th Avenue,
at his side.
Earlier in the week he mistook
running water at the curb
for an acequia
like the one crossing our yard
in Santa Fe.
And then, that first morning
on the third floor of a,
concrete and brick school building
far from the Sandias
& the Sangre de Cristos
he carefully drew Kokopelli
calling the clouds
I smiled at his petroglyph
his new teacher simply shrugged.
By week’s end he proclaimed:
this is not a school;
there’s nothing real here,
no kitchen, no place to play
in the dirt.
—
Lynne Shapiro lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey, but keeps a supply of green chiles and chicos in her fridge. Her poems and essays have been included in a variety of literary publications, including terrain.org, Decomposition: An Anthology of Fungi-Inspired Poems, qarrtsiluni, Blue Print Review, and Mslexia.
200 New Mexico Poems 