Rehearsal

I sit at this keyboard as I once sat
on the hard piano bench.

My heart strains; my fingers.
On the screen, each fluted note

quivers. So many ways to practice
love. Repeat. Start over.

Priscilla Atkins lives and works in Holland, Michigan, where there are blueberry fields, a big lake, no traffic jams and plenty of time to remember childhood in Illinois, college in Massachusetts, teaching in the San Fernando Valley, and shipping a small white car to Hawaii (where she and that very same car lived for ten years). Her poems have danced onto the pages of Poetry London, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, and other journals. During the day, she pretends to be a librarian.