Two Poems

Shope Creek

Shope Creek has all the blue butterflies a person might hope for, count on, on a stormy, sun-drenched kind of afternoon. A person might hope for berries too, but best not to count on them. Two is how many you’d find of the elusive wineberry. Blackberries are more forthcoming but hardly accountable. A meagre handful all told until the bramble plain is discovered. Corridors of blackberry vines and bee balm, fruiting and blooming one last hurrah!

Tea for Two

On a peeling green porch, two women lean in. Their space is circumscribed by perfume, steam, and conversation like skipping stones, ambiguous sunlight a chimera of warmth across their empty laps.

And the dog dozing in tall, dry grasses, ears tilted this way and that? She hears the leaves letting go one by one and says not a word.

Sause Reynolds has lived in Western North Carolina since 2008. She earned an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Women’s Studies and has only recently begun dabbling in creative writing.

About Shope Creek—I wrote this after hiking at Shope Creek. The date was August 2, the tail end of berry season.

About Tea for Two—I was marveling at the layers of reality underlying every interaction. The dog’s serenity constitutes a counterpoint to the convolution of being human.