O Fortune, Are You Listening?
       

Having washed you down the sink
and off the plates of my children

are you swimming in the egg
and milk of my sewer?

Are you there in my cracked patio
slab humming with sparrows?

O fortune! I grow old
and the moon becomes your wheel.

I watch you by the dark
of our broken street lamps.

I am still without
kingdom. They say

you can melt
my poverty like ice.

This is what happened
when you made me

a troubled match in love
but still, still the wheel comes up,

the fog finally lifts.
After forsaking me,

I am secure. Now
I am one of those

who will pluck strings
and sing—of what is left

with what is left—
my weapons, my selves.

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Copyright © 2020 Natalie Solmer All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission