about the author
Ken Poyner has published during the last forty years perhaps three hundred poems in sixty or so venues, with his
latest chapbook being Sciences, Social. Most recently, he has appeared in Eclectica, Blue Unicorn, Poet Lore,
FRiGG, Blue Collar Review, Adirondack Review, Medulla Review and elsewhere. He lives with his world class power
lifter wife and a collection of rescue cats in the bottom far right hand stretch of Virginia.
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THE ORDINARY OCCURRENCE
Ken Poyner
Alternative content
A girl is folding tomorrow over a double bed. There are some things I will not believe, but they frighten me anyway. The girl is having no trouble. She smoothes wrinkles and folds tomorrow again. Bottom corner to top, right side back to left, her arms held out from her body like a trawler’s rigging. Her fingers bring no more pressure than is necessary. I know this is imaginary, but when she looks up at me I imagine that perhaps tomorrow could be a tangible item that in a girl’s hands, if the girl were given to detailed domestic work, could be fashioned as a quilt or a bedspread or a net, something under which a man could like naked and imagine the girl. She pats tomorrow curiously flat and hitches up one leg of her peasant dress and I am reminded it is only today.