Susan Barry-Schulz

Self-portrait as a Fitted Lid

I left New York in a warm wind. A pocket full
of posies. Always falling short. I needed more
space for my things. My notebooks and letters,
my collection of olive green sweaters. My psoriatic
elbows and too wide sighs. The pigeons on the 3rd
Avenue Bridge shimmered for real under the ice-
cream-cake-frosting-blue sky. Tugs nudged barges
of garbage eastward toward someplace I didn’t want
to think about. Plumped in the suburbs I skimmed through
the syllabus. Grew soon into a Pampered-Mary-
Kay-Tupperware-Chef choked by the automatic
sprinklers and the neon green of the fertilized
lawns. I took the form of the bell-shaped darkness
housed beneath the tarnished curves of a candle
snuffer. Wet-blanketed and contained I concretized
extinguished. Embodied the opposite of a breeze.

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness. Her poetry has appeared in SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Rogue Agent, New Verse News, Nightingale & Sparrow, Shooter Literary Magazine, The Wild Word, Bending Genres, B O D Y, Gyroscope Review, West Trestle Review, and in other print and online journals and anthologies.