Sue Reed Crouse
Rise
All of our lives we’re learning to fly. Children in the park wear capes, launch kites, baby’s spoon of strained peas becomes a plane. From the time we arrive, we prepare to depart. Watch someone greet a waterfall, arms lifted, and you know they’re flying in their bones. The gods divide their time between clouds and crepuscular rays. Our dead turn into birds. Our dogs jump until their hips displace. Ghosts rattle in the attics and our dragons have wings. We wrap our supplications in curls of smoke. We grow up. Even the smallest parts of us want to escape, to rise. I know when I look at my veins; summoned by the drum of years, they fly to the tops of my hands, almost free.
Sue Reed Crouse’s poems have appeared in Grey Sparrow, Damselfly Press, Earth’s Daughters, Aurorean (as Showcase Poet), Verse Wisconsin, Midway Journal and others. In 2011, she completed the Foreword Program, a 2-year poetry apprenticeship at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She lives in Stillwater with her husband, 3 pugs and cat.