Postcard from a Friend

Sarah Webb

October 22, 2021

Once, I got a postcard from my friend Sheila.

It was a London scene—the Tower,

a place with a history: hidden rooms, forgotten 

oubliettes, the princes who disappeared there,

Henry the Eighth's young wife embroidering

on the eve of her beheading. On the battlements,

ravens nest, blood-minded birds.

Sheila is not blood-minded. She lives a quiet life 

with her husband, and when I ask her, what's been happening,

she says, Not much. Been doing a bit of writing.

Tranquil, I could say, but I would be wrong about that—

ten murder mysteries she's written, with victims

falling off bridges into the Columbia or off

balconies onto rocks. Bodies crumpled in pools of scarlet, 

snared in blackberry bushes, buried under mudflows.

And what was she doing in London?

Teaching Shakespeare: the blood-stained

hands of Macbeth, poison in the ear

of Hamlet's father, ghosts who walk.

When I visit, we walk beside the Columbia.

I entertain her with stories from my life—camping 

on the desert, finding an enormous snakeskin on my doorstep, 

shots fired by a barricaded husband and the neighborhood lockdown.

Beside us, the water flows calmly. Sheila smiles calmly.

She is probably plotting an overturned sailboat

and an encounter with a giant sturgeon in the murky depths.

Sarah Webb divides her time between Corpus Christi and a lake in the Hill Country. Former Poetry Editor for the journal Crosstimbers, she co-edits the Zen magazine Just This in Austin. Her collections Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and Red Riding Hood's Sister (Purple Flag, 2018) and many of her poems wander the line between the everyday and the fantastic.