‘Biking the Big River Trail on the First Warm Sunday in March’, ‘Wrought’ & ‘Opossum’

Julie Martin lives near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. Her work has recently appeared in the following journals: The Talking Stick, Pasque Petals, Plants and Poetry, Agates, and The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative. With poet and artist River Urke, she co-hosts Up Close: Meet the Poet Behind the Verse, a quarterly program that showcases the work of local poets in the Twin Cities and beyond.

Biking the Big River Trail on the First Warm Sunday in March

the ride was not without surprises:
a man’s long white beard was being conjured by the wind before it parted
and shot over his shoulders; heading in the opposite direction, another man,

in his golden years, zipped past on a unicycle; melting remnants
of snow beside the path revealed that someone had lost their sole,
one black memory foam insert, separated from its mate.

Approaching Pickerel Lake, sunlight danced on the water beside
a blackened shoreline where a recent controlled burn left the soil rich,
fertile, primed for new growth. As I turned my bike around for the return ride,

I was fortified by a recollection from my childhood in Colorado Springs:
the great-niece of Helen Hunt Jackson,who, well into her eighties,
pedaled around town on a fixed-gear bike, poised, in a skirt
and matching blazer, pillbox hat pinned atop her steel gray hair.

Bracing against the wind, I pedaled uphill and into my sixth decade.

Wrought

Fearfully and wonderfully made,
at the core, we are palindromes.
Knit in our mothers’ wombs,
x and y chromosomes lining
up in repeat sequences,
flowing in both directions,
inhabiting every cell,
we unfold in symmetry.

Then there is the eye —
mirror unto itself,
window to the soul,
portal through which light enters.

From the outside,
our bodies are matchy-matchy,
like glossy catalog pages
of families wearing coordinated
Christmas pajamas;

limbs and sense organs complementing
each other in bilateral pairs:
eyes, hands, knees, ears, feet, nostrils.

It is the heart that shows the first visible asymmetry.

Opossum

I peer into morning’s blackness as my breath
fogs the windowpane adding a halo
to the glow of the street lamp.

Overnight, snowfall has covered everything
in undisturbed brilliance. The velvet brown
branches of the sumac are laced in whiteness.

Streets, sidewalks, rooftops dazzle
with the purity of a holy winter night. Inside,
on the verge of attending to the mundane:
feeding the dogs, making coffee,
preparing for the work day,

I almost miss the constellation
of tiny, star-shaped footprints
advancing across the front steps,
tail mark dragging behind

trailing winter magic in its wake.

Julie Martin lives near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. Her work has recently appeared in the following journals: The Talking Stick, Pasque Petals, Plants and Poetry, Agates, and The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative. With poet and artist River Urke, she co-hosts Up Close: Meet the Poet Behind the Verse, a quarterly program that showcases the work of local poets in the Twin Cities and beyond. Read more of her work at JulieMartinpoet.com.