Four and Twenty by Jeanine Stevens

Favorite game: hide between fresh laundered sheets

and starched table cloths, fragrant, sun filled.

Windy days all the better, chaotic,

grass stains on my pinafore.

Certain my mother can’t see me:

             swing, weave, spin.

How could she miss the skinny legs and scabby knees? 

Convinced I was invisible,

thought about the maid in the garden hanging

clothes, a black bird snipping off her nose? 

Did one of four and twenty flee,

just missed being baked in a crusty shell?

Blackbirds, always in the alleyway

pecking pink carrion. 

Now, when I see a rare clothesline, I pause

admire the living, the care given,

the personal on pegs.







Jeanine Stevens is a poet and visual artist. Author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press), and Sailing on Milkweed (Cherry Grove Collections). Winner of the McGuffin Poet Hunt and the Ekphrasis Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in journals in the United States and the UK.