Rooftop Poetry Club - Peggy Towers

Peggy Towers

Bio:
Peggy's poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review and was nominated for a Pushcart Award. She has also published in Mom Writer, Terra Poetica, The Black Mountain Review, and other publications. In the summer of 2006, she won a fellowship in poetry to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Poems:

High Hopes

If I dared, I'd harbor high hopes for us.
We'd share scenery, the air as if we inhabited
some underwater world with a single tank of oxygen.
You'd breathe then pass the mouth piece to me.
But then I'd forget to share, and you'd have to scrawl
on a waterproof notepad, "Don't suck it all up."
Or you'd try to give me air, but I'd sprout gills
and get wrapped up in some octopus.
Finally, you'd succumb to love with a dolphin.
She'd slip her snout into your mouth and inflate your
lungs.
You'd be amazed that breathing could be such ecstasy.
You'd ditch the tank. Undulating by one day
in my school of bottom feeders, I'd spy it glistening
beneath the seaweed and muck.
I'd haul it in and suck its sour air.

Anti-sonnet

Distance forgives us, but isn't that just
what it's for, to pull us away from the fight?
Those little details that drove us wild,
the chestnut scrawl in your amber iris,
the scarlet birthmark on my chin-
now rusty flaws. I don't know why
the attraction dropped off like a magnet
losing its draw. That's just how we are,
you and I. Oh, don't pretend it isn't true,
that we're still opposites tucked tight
in a tail spin, your positive to my negative.
We're both electrons now, pushing each
other out, repelling it's called.

Grendel In Love

And when the Shaper's art
wasn't enough, love came along
and tore you apart.
Oh, I know you wanted more,
and I wasn't enough for you.
Mothers are never enough,
though our children
are everything to us.
But did it have to be the Queen?
Nothing alive or dead
could change my mind,
you said, sounding
as steadfast as your father
with your murderous scheme.
Then you laid eyes on her,
mooning around the meadhall,
all self-sacrifice, her whole life
gone up in smoke
just to keep peace between
her weasly brother and the King.
Her yellow hair trailing the length
of her back was a golden rope
around your neck,
choking the sense out of you..
Then bam, I changed my mind, you said
and claimed it would be meaningless,
a pointless pleasure.
A pointless life is more like it.
Who would have thought
that such a puppy dog love
could shatter a monster's resolve?