“Soft Pockets” by Bonnie Markowski

Soft Pockets

This morning I want to drop
my knives, bury my hatchet hands

in soft pockets, let them rub against
an easy seam or at least

I want to stop cutting at you
rest my ferocious fists in the soft pockets

of your gardening jeans, roll your pocketknife
and coins between my fingers, not remembering.

I want to climb away from the granite feelings,
use my hands for kneading bread, clay, hard stances

As you lay now in the soft pocket of memory

I want to lick pink cotton candy
from a paper cone rebuffing the too sweetness of it

twirl in a gingham dress mommy made say,
daddy, look at my patent leather shoes.

Dance around the ballroom like a small princess
balanced on your clumsy feet,

You white knuckled the course, raged,
refused to physically repel over the ledge

though your mind leapt long ago.
I hung on too, to the tight stubbly braid of your dying

firmly fearing I’d be taken up with you, so jungled
together were our angsts, like knotted hairs

needing a good brushing, 100 times a night
with a boar bristle brush, before I went to sleep

in the soft pocket of what you could not be.

Bonnie Markowski

Bonita Lini Markowski is a poet and educator who lives and teaches in northeastern Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems have appeared in the Gyroscope Review, PA Bards Northeastern Review (2020), River and South Review (2021), PA Bards Eastern Poetry Review (2021), and Sonic Boom Journal, and are forthcoming in BirdHouse Magazine and the anthology, The Power of the Feminine I. Her poetry was also selected for the award-winning Poetry in Transit program (2023), Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Headshot: Ann M. Toole

Photo Credit: Staff