SUSAN COHEN
Omens Being Bad
The teapot lost its whistle.
Outside, people didn’t even try to sing.
Sun struggled to rise before noon,
crouched behind a mask of fog.
Fear kept writing the same lines.
Two-hundred thousand.
Three-hundred thousand.
I couldn’t make the numbers add up.
In the same week, two long snakes
paused across dirt trails in front of me.
Both times, I froze and scanned for rattles
while the snakes waited to read the signs
from my panicky feet. When paths cross
now, we stand apart, trying to divine
which one among us might bode bad luck.
So far, no one I know.
Susan Cohen’s second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. Her poems have recently appeared in PANK, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, the Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the anthologies: Rewilding; Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press); Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books); and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Street Press). She lives in Berkeley, California.