Thanksgiving

let us be thankful for

the way men when they make love to you

support some of their weight on their arms

so you don’t get all squashed and out-of-breath

and the way you can keep your gin in the freezer and

it doesn’t get solid just icy-cold and syrupy

so you can put it on summer pancakes

and the way slants of light from passing headlights

slide around children’s haunted rooms

and make the vampires run away

and the way bathtub plugs

below the shining porcelain of the tub

keep back the bubbling muck of our polluted earth

and the way nurses cuddle you with heated blankets

in those icy operating rooms and

oh yes the nice clean knives that slice open your heart

and the way bombers stay so high above the clouds

their shadows get lost on the way down and we can pretend

the engines are the drone of honey-laden summer bees

and the way the priest puts god in your mouth,

like a gaudy-feathered mother bird

feeding a hungry baby sparrow

and the way we’re made to die in fear and pain

so we have one last chance to say

I’m sorry I’ll never do it again

Tree Riesener has published poetry and short fiction in such magazines as The Evergreen Review, Identity Theory, Pindeldyboz, Blue Fifth, 5_trope, Loch Raven Review, The Belletrist Review, Nebo, The Source, Hinge, Schuylkill Valley Review, Diner, Lynx, The Ghazal Page, Fine Print, Muse Apprentice Guild, and E-Verse Radio.   A winner in the Authors in the Park Short Story Competition, she also won a double first for the Short-Short Story and the Literary Short Story at the Philadelphia Writers Conference. Her achievements include the Semi-Finals of the Pablo Neruda Poetry Competition, three short stories staged in the Writing Aloud Productions of InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia, a Hawthornden International Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and the William Van Wert Fiction Award. She is Managing Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. The author of Liminalog, a chapbook of ghazals and sijo, she is active in Philadelphia area spoken word activities.  Her new chapbook, Inscapes, will be published in late 2007 or early 2008 by Finishing Line Press.