For hours I wait. For houses
long and lined
along the stony shore.
Few items in this life
make my ______ ______:
1. 3 was always my number
not lucky, just a number.
2. The germs meant more to me
than a number.
3. Dying, I was scared to die.
My mother had to wake too early
to force me out the door.
4. My family was a disease.
Repetition is safe, sure as the dull thump
of a heart, a rib cage.
Where does the mind go when the body’s on vacation?
For hours I wait like bits of stars in the bath water,
the way a pigeon juts its head forward over and over.
Sara Toruño-Conley is an English professor at Los Medanos College in northern California and the Poetry Review Editor for Boxcar Poetry Review, a quarterly online literary journal. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Sara’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in some of the following publications: Forge, The Café Review, Found: Fiction and Poetry Anthology, Ginosko, Modoc Independent News (Winner of the Surprise Valley Poetry Prize, April 2009), Eclectica, The CommonLine Project, Temenos, and Monday Nigh
