Beeson

4X2

an online poetry journal

  • Coup de Foudre

    by Miranda Beeson

    Did you lose your keys? I say
    Rolling down my car window
    On a wild windy mid-June day
    By the bay. White caps, the bridge
    & you. Talk about cinematic.
    Why do you look just like John
    Slattery in Mad Men? All cropped
    White hair & vigor? Can I say—
    You are life force made flesh?
    Your stunned expression stuns
    Me right back. A woman drives
    By & rectifies the wreckage of
    Your day. What are the odds?
    (Your black credit card too...)
    I say I knew it was you, not
    Knowing why, but knowing
    I knew. The magnetic field of
    Feeling—the absence of thought.
    I found them washed up on
    The beach. Down there. Where
    I live. Follow me.     And you do.
    A strange intimacy—watching
    Happiness fracture the face of
    A man you just met. Its naked
    Beauty. I hand you your keys
    & card—keys worn & warm,
    Card sleek & hard. We are palm
    To palm. Pull me through the
    Words of the world where words
    Matter. Sever the slice of late
    Afternoon sun that falls between
    Us. Let me slip out of my skin.
    Slip into yours.

  • The Smith's Tale

    by Miranda Beeson

    In the low shadowed corner
    of my mid-winter 3 a.m. room
    stands a sad hulk of a man
    hump-shouldered & silent.
    His stiff sooty clothes
    layered like shingles on
    the house of his soul. The
    blacksmith’s apprentice—
    his molten days flowing
    one through the next in
    a succession of horse shoes
    & hitching posts, hammers
    & tongs. A solitary spirit who
    has refused to leave this 18th
    C. smithy, currently the house
    of my 21st century friends.
    I have had such visitations
    before. Fright does not factor
    in, only a palpable curiosity—
    why a weight won’t lift.
    You have seen it, I’m sure.
    The last fierce struggle
    followed by an ascension
    —the relief in the room—
    a body turning the color
    of clay, the eyes dim pools—
    but such a lift, shift in the air—
    like a longed-for breeze.
    He regards me, hooded brow,
    black eyes, this neanderthal,
    all spite and sorrow—a plea
    for help made flesh.
    Blacksmith heal thyself
    I say. I am busy carrying
    my own weights, measuring
    out my own molten days.
    Either hammer the iron
    or lie flat on the anvil, waiting
    to be struck. Smite those
    chains—link by link.

Poet's Statement: The blacksmith in “The Smith’s Tale” was as described in the poem: a visitation (not a dream) in the corner of my bedroom in an 18th century house that belongs to friends of mine in Leverett, Massachusetts. Their house was indeed a smithy way back when. The poem arrived ten years after the event, while I was pondering why some spirits seem to let go of this life with such ease, and others remain so stubborn—refusing to let go. (I never slept in that bedroom again.)

We go through periods of our lives where visceral desire is unknown to us—then, when least expected, we find ourselves in its presence again. "Coup de Foudre" was such a moment. I am reminded of the lines from Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Touch Me:” “What makes the engine go? / Desire, desire, desire. / The longing for the dance / stirs in the buried life.”

Bio: Miranda Beeson is the recipient of the 2017 Jody Donohue Poetry Prize. New poems can be found in The Southampton Review, The Laurel Review and Badlands. Her chapbook Ode to the Unexpected is available from Shrinking Violet Press. She has been awarded several New York State Council on the Arts Grants for teaching a generation of young poets. Currently happily at work on a manuscript of poems, WILDLIFE, she is an MFA candidate at Stony Brook Southampton.