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Portent
Andrea Hollander

He walks back into the house
later than yesterday, Daylight
Saving Time having given him
an extra hour of light, he says
when she asks. He removes his boots
in the entry, clears his throat.
The door still won’t latch
and she hears him fiddling with it

again, muttering as he did
yesterday, the same few phrases
she assumes to mean he intends
to make it right tomorrow.
She’s at the kitchen sink
Brillo-ing another burnt streak
she caused in one of the pans,
one more of her small blunders

that have accumulated
exponentially these last months
since he gave his word
he ended what he swore
that woman started.
This is who they were then:
the two of them trying hard
to convince themselves

that the past was the past
and not a harbinger.

—
Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for 15 years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for 22. Hollander’s fifth full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home, but via Zoom since the pandemic.

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Have you read these poems:
A Fine Poem by Paul Willis
In Praise of Uncertainty by Joel Savishinsky

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