Lois Marie Harrod

Lois Marie Harrod's 18th collection Spat was published by Finishing Line Press, 2021 and her chapbook Woman by Blue Lyra, 2020. Dodge poet, life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She currently teaches college level courses in literature at The Center for Modern Aging, Princeton. More info and links to her online work www.loismarieharrod.org

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► Lois Marie Harrod's microchaps, selected poems & audio versions are available below.

Origami Microchaps	Selected Poems
How can the heart?
Click title to download PDF Cover photo by author •	The Dead Are Quiet They don't answer when you ask if they want a drink or had a good lay. They don't leave love notes in the charnel house reminding you to warm the sheets or turn off the light or lock the coffin, but you wake in the middle of the night hearing them whisper in an extinct language, maybe Mycenean Greek.	How can the heart? on which everything depends suddenly begin beating like John Bonham battering Moby Dick? And why does it happen in the middle of sudden grief— this crazy stick pick licking life, life, life sudden whip-flip in the middle of sadness? • Lois Marie Harrod © 2024
Karl's Rhubard
Click title to download PDF microchap Collage Rhubarb Sky by JanK * Her Face - First published in Shot Gun Journal: Online Journal for Short Poems	Anatole’s Hold He was holding me loosely his arms were round his arms round me how I change everything one leg, could you, love could you love a one-legged man? One leg over your legs one leg, two oh, he had two legs too keeping me warm keeping my two legs warm Anatole though some sunrise some Sundays I rise imagining him carrying me through the thrash through the threshold hopping on one leg not two. - Karl's Rhubarb Karl was a slob but he planted rhubarb and handed his stalks over the back fence, Here, cook this, he said, low carb, and though he was garbed in a stinky himmelfarb t-shirt, he was a heart-throb among the old ladies who longed for rhubarb pie and rhubarb tea. What I am saying is there was something about him that even I loved, the jam I could make, though I knew poison in those spargelkraut leaves. What I am saying is that I kept my cats from perturbing his dog, I kept my sickles from his sheaves.	What My Mother Told Me Not much. She wasn’t much of a talker. Sometimes a tad. Be quiet in church. Mostly cautionary. Chatter is the coin of fools. She didn’t know silence makes some uneasy and refused gossip. Be kind, she said and I tried to harness my tongue but the pen proved, as pens do, that writing is a sword silent and sneaky. - Grandmother's Oppossum What was she if not pretense? Nice when she felt dour Dour when she could not mend. Her sex, the sour lemon on her tongue No, he did not want to hear her woes or tend her pleasure, she was just the tight end to the long game, the tag end in the downtrend. Keep your secrets to yourself, Grandfather said, You’re luckier than most of your widow friends. - Lois Marie Harrod © 2020
Nightmares of the Minor Poet
Click title to download PDF microchap Cover photo: beatnik girl By fille de la ville Audio recording by Lois Marie Harrod 'From Nightmares of the Minor Poet' was previously published in Off the Coast	The Minor Poet If the world had been his aviary, he would have been the lesser bird, unable to sing the high notes or the low though he knew enough of depression to spill himself into that well which is the world. And perhaps that was his purpose, he thought, a beak that might bring to the surface just enough water to sustain someone, anyone, passing by, not for eons or years, but an hour . . . less, just until she trod a little farther on and found a fresh stream, where she could sit, maybe listen.	The Minor Poet Tries Haiku Stinkbug hibernating in Manny’s suitcase– been there since Tennessee. Manny sips his morning chai, too noisy, can’t write, all the lattes chattering. Tattered scarecrow – left in the wild oats never did more than watch. Steamy bath, – Manny plops in ouch! Cold rain falling – and no umbrella Manny takes yours. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2014
The Blinding Walls
Cover - ‘Mykonos” (the web) •	A Little Poem is best. No one has time or inclination for voyages or treks. Long wars take a life or more and the shortest spat becomes a drawn-out divorce. We’ve been here and there fore and aft. So avoid story. Avoid conflict and all its sticky dead. Be slick. Be quick. A little poem is best.	Splitting the Chair Like dividing – a baby Solomon knew which mother by her distress. But the chair was hideous and the child, not easy either. So take it, she says, to the one who is leaving. You chose the chameleon green. Keep it, he says, believing he is generous. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2012 Acknowledgment: Hot Metal Press 2009
Breadcrumbs	Breadcrumbs So many substitutions in this story: stepmother for mother, brother for father, morsels of muffin for little white stones, and once the oven was hot, witch for boy, and in earlier locations, Gretel for pearl, grill for teeth, take my thumbs for chicken bones, grandma, take my babies for wolf meat. I’d give you my incisors, my mother said when I knocked out my own, carrion for crow, cave for castle, ogre for goat who suddenly regrets he didn’t eat the damn kid when he could have. In some tales a few children get back home. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2012 Acknowledgment: Lunch Ticket	Truth sat in the Barber Chair Truth sat in the barber chair bald and cold except for the fringe the blind woman tried to trim. It’s often that way: we pare the eyes from the potato and shuck the silk from ears of corn. But tidying up – the relative – even to set it free reveals how naked truth can be.
Penelope Decides What to Wear to Her Funeral	Penelope Decides What to Wear to Her Funeral Depends, she says, on when she dies: in winter the blue silk with its Mediterranean shifts, in summer, white clouds, the blinding walls of Mykonos. Whatever the weather, she will look good, better than life, Botox can do that these days, a new body before she’s shrunken under, just in case her man returns from his wanderings to stand at her casket, to say he loved her once with the terseness of men who drift, who suddenly remember that once they promised to be faithful as the flotsam that bore them home. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2012 Acknowledgment: Fickle Muses

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