PALMETTO POEM:  In December Artroom

By Kit Loney, republished with permission

Here is how you get filing cabinets to fly:
Begin with stuffing drawers bulge with pictures–
dragonflies, butterflies, all things on wings.

Airplanes and rocket ships, dancers,
sports page clippings of leaping athletes.
Jam more pictures: Leonardo‘s helicopters,

parachutes, birds. Giotto’s angels.
From ceiling suspend flocks
of origami cranes, flapping.

Scatter floor with glitterspill,
storm of snowflake snips. And now,
David and Rodney spark over some

mumble about somebody’s mama.
Your filing cabinets kick off their wheels
and hurl their weight like sumo wrestlers.

Later, Mr. Jackson will climb over the pile
of crumpled metal and cascading paper,
clear the doorway where they crash-

landed. (Nobody squashed– a miracle!)
But, at this particular moment, three students wheel
a piano to the gym for the holiday concert–

one pushing, one steering the bull of it past
your door, and a third kid skipping alongside, playing
Jingle Bells as they roll, then Heart and Soul.

Kit Loney’s poems have appeared in Prime Number, Fall Lines, Emrys Journal, Kakalak, Yemassee, Qarrtsiluni, Waccamaw, One, and Poetry East. She received the 2012 Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship from SC Academy of Authors. She has an MFA in Fiber Arts, and for twenty years taught middle school art on James Island.