Here is the latest installment of Poet’s Corner, presented by the Edmonds-based EPIC Poetry Group.

Pie Lovers’ Recipe

If you love me, plant a rose for me
And if you think you’ll love me for a long, long time
Plant an apple tree. ~Malvina Reynolds

Only those without the love of pie can understand:
There are those who don’t like pie and baking less. Those
who love flowers that grow on trees and dinner out
with no dessert are those most likely to hate pie.
Pie haters married to gardeners with a sweet tooth
build their crusts from oil and wax paper as they learned
in home economics, not from their fussy mothers.

Only love could muster these people to the task of pie:
How the husband revels in pie from his own tree
How she (his own beloved) baked it just for him alone
How she peeled the fruit in one unbroken tail
How she cut away the tunnels made by worms
How he eats it breakfast lunch and dinner until it is a legend
How she revived that legend from his maggoty apples once a year

Our love is a pie conceived in the dream of roses and apples:
A cool pie fashioned from pink silk filled with rose petals
Held up in branches among the nodding apples
Big enough to bivouac under the stars
A pie that never robbed a tree,
Its cinnamon just a potpourri
Where lovers nestle snugly.

Kristina Stapleton

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In Dreams I Pilot A Rug

My life is smooth as scenery
seen from a flying carpet
where I can stroke the struggling ducks
as we fly South in unison.

My way is centered on that woven garden
while below the landscape flows
in forests and furrows, glens and marshes
and tapestries of tree tops gone

from green to rustling to bald,
so like my age mates who have wrinkled
and lost heart, sprung leaks
and hold themselves aloft with canes,

but this dream sequence glosses
over all of that decay under the rug,
avoids the moths and entropy
by flying forward without thought

of destinations (likely underground)
of health or wealth or fame or flop.
The home of air becomes enough.
Horizons on all sides butter spread
with beauty to the very edge.

Kristina Stapleton

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The Rental

In the house stuffed with children
the lights are haunted with flickering
and the drains have slowed,
as full of hair as a gagging cat.

Long ago we lived here and knew
the house wisdom: never run
the dishwasher and microwave
in unison. It is too much.

Hard on the hinges: the slammed door
anger brutal enough to break locks.
Go easy on the appliances and floors.
Make everything last another year.

Another year and another year on the lease
until the house becomes wed to another
family whose memories soak the walls
that enclosed their holidays.

And the landlord is a distant fairy
who doesn’t raise the rent year after year,
who sends the plumber and electrician,
the patron saint of folks just getting by.

Kristina Stapleton

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Kristina Stapleton lives in Edmonds with her blues guitar-playing husband Billy, and Thelma the 20-year-old cat. She is a regular at the Easy Speak open mic and a member of EPIC poetry group. She was recently published in Western Friend magazin

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The EPIC Poetry Group is open to the members of the public (free of charge) who are interested expressing and improving their poetry writing skills. The group meets the second Tuesday of the month at the Edmonds Library from 6-7:45 p.m..