Two Poems by Jade Riordan

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YELLOW LIGHT
Jade Riordan

I slip
a yellow eyetooth
into the porchlight

and a wasp’s nest
between the screen
and the window pane.

You are welcome
to look inside
this home

but not to enter.

CANDLES
Jade Riordan

No one and no one and nothing
at all.

We make an occasion of it:
hang the ghosts back in the closet,
stuff the scarecrow’s shirt
with hair, close the photo albums.

We light candles, light the straw
and hair, warm the good
white shirts. we scorch his face
from the family photos

Then we burn the sight of him
into our collective memory.
generations from today,
our great-grandchildren will
open the closet door and catch
a glimpse of another lifetime.
(thank goodness, it’s not theirs.)

But for now, we lock the room
shut, call it a guesthouse, but
never invite anyone to stay. we
stay though. year after year, we
bleach the shirts till they’re too
bright to see, keep the crows
from the garden, and, always, we
keep the candles lit.

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Jade Riordan is a poet from the Northwest Territories, Canada, and a student at the University of Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine; CV2; Noble / Gas Qtrly; Peacock Journal; Room; Yes, Poetry; and elsewhere. She is a selection committee member (poetry reader) with Bywords.