May, week 1
LeeAnn Pickrell
Doing the hustle of work and coffee, then switching to pop and singing along with my Adele station that doesn’t play Adele but songs by songwriters like Adele. Doing the cha-cha with the piles on my desk. The kitties waltzing with sunbeams. The hills in the dog park where we walk are alive with lupine and wild cucumber. At a performance in San Francisco—Unbound, Snowblind, Anima Animus—the ballet of my finger as it circles the cup’s lid, searching for the opening in the dark, bringing the coffee to my mouth to drink, sensing my mother in every movement I make. Cinco de Mayo and a pitcher’s duel through the bottom of the 9th inning, a flamenco of cutters and sliders and fastballs, two-seam and four, making it home in time to see Kris Davis walk it off with a show-tune homerun in the bottom of the 12th.
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet living in Richmond, California. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, most recently in The World of Prompts: Poems Inspired by Prompts, and her chapbook Punctuated was just published by Bottlecap Press. Her book Gathering the Pieces of Days is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in April 2025. She writes LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry on Substack at leeannpickrell.substack.com and her website is www.leeannpickrell.com.
‘May, week 1’ received an honourable mention in The Prose Poem’s 2024 Prose Poetry Competition.