Writing sample by Tova Gardner

This is going to be a really big poem

I can feel it.
In my sisters apt of white circles
waving out to kitchen, cracked
linoleum. By the way it was me
who pushed the guy off his seat at the bar
so you’d have a place. When I walked in
I slipped and prayed you didn’t notice,
me under all those feet.
It’s about Vermont and pavement,
also the city and its farms. The apples
they pick from slender trees in
Washington, packed in fleece and making
their way on carefully freighted trains.
You keep walking in. There is Alma whose
name we changed from Masha. It made us
think of beet water and vodka. Alma in the
window, the countryside unfolds and folds
behind. She wants to see if the blue tattoos
on his arms feel blue. I put the syrup of maples
on everything.
I lived once in a smokehouse as slow sap.