Self Help

For the retired and/or retiring, a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual, a poet's musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club. Life could become a summer afternoon, a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout, part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next. The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure--napping, complaining, gardening, volunteering, and so on. Observing time's curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging, and understanding more clearly every day that time doesn't exist anyway, the poet relishes moments, which are ... liable to be caught like a leaf in the eddy of a brook, lodged only long enough to look, and which become her subjects.

Elizabeth Poreba taught English in New York City high schools for thirty-five years and now volunteers as a docent at the Old Merchant's House in Manhattan, a tutor of conversational English at New York University, and a writer of letters to the editor for a couple of environmental organizations. She has published a chapbook, The Family Calling (2011) and a collection of poetry, Vexed (Wipf and Stock, 2015) Her poems have appeared in Ducts.org, First Literary Review-East, and Commonweal, among other print and online publications.