Two Poems
By L.B. Sedlacek

Avoiding Mile 16

is inevitable with a shift and a push of
the clutch, but a sound unremarkable
as a tag dinging on glass, an ear
pressed to a billboard, a vent in a
closet floor with no ducts. Suburb
spies go free leaving peeling walls,
hanging gutters, broken stairs.
The exit looms up ahead, the car
swerves, our luggage tumbles, but no
matter how hard we try we can never
get everything packed up the same
way, or in the same order again.

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Trickle Effect

It takes two hands to crush up hushpuppies
fine enough to fit small bird mouths
anxious for a feed of something sinful
overflowing with deep fried pores
thick as blocks walling up gates to
shut down factories their green window teeth
dark with sweat moist with blood
leftover from motionless fingers wrapped
in red tape or newspapers or chunks of
soup served in plastic bowls the drops
trickling and eventually landing on every one
of us one drop at a time.

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L.B. Sedlacek is a poet and writer living in western North Carolina. LB’s poems have appeared in such places as Big Pulp, The Broad River Review, Third Wednesday, The Broken Plate, Main Street Rag, Tales of the Talisman, and others.  When not writing or reading poetry, L.B. enjoys swimming, riding bicycles, doing volunteer work especially for the local humane society.is the Director of the School of Architecture + Art at Norwich University in Northfield, VT. She has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University.

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Photograph by Gessy Alvarez