April Lindner's poetry collection, Skin, received the 2002 Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies and textbooks, including Good Poems (Garrison Keillor, ed.); Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (R. S. Gwynn, ed.); and the forthcoming fifth edition of Western Wind (edited by John Frederick Nims and David Mason). With R. S. Gwynn, she co-edited Contemporary American Poetry, an anthology in Longman's Penguin Academics series.  She also edited Lineas Connectadas (forthcoming from Sarabande Books), an anthology of new poetry from the United States, translated into Spanish for a Mexican audience.   A 2002 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee Writers' Workshop, Lindner teaches creative writing at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

          I feel my being dance from ear to ear
                                         —Theodore Roethke

One moment I'm staring into my teacup
at a shifting milky cloud and the next

a narrow alley opens into light:

the sunswept stone of St. Mark's Square—
tourists, pigeons, vendors at their stalls,
and just beyond, the pale green Adriatic.
Vaporetti buzz past, churn up mist.

I was here once: my body remembers.

My knees bend to deliver me
into the crowd. My scalp recalls
that day's heat, and my nostrils
fill again with honeydew and ancient, bookish dust.
Or I'm swaying on the Tobin Bridge,
trucks thrumming on all sides, and sunrise
smouldering in the windows of North Boston,

or, still more distant, a kitchen,
the harvest gold Frigidaire humming.

My legs dangle from the high stool.

Am I six? Ten? The air is brown
with London Broil and roast potatoes.
The kitchen timer softly ticks
and for a moment, I'm as present, there,

as ever, this vision, like the others,
brief and vivid as a flashbulb's pop.
This trick of memory, this little gift—
is it the coffee? Or a random pattern
of sunlight on tile? Or nothing more
than a misfired serotonin jolt, that launches me
as if the past were someplace I could visit,

as if there could be such a thing as past

when even the present sizzles from synapse to synapse:
blinding, ordinary, gorgeous, gone.

© April Lindner 2006.