Square Corner

Suzanne Morris

July 10, 2022

The quaint old shop front

with red- and green-striped awnings

looks out on the Cherokee County

courthouse square

the entrance facing crosswise

as if it were a

photograph on a turn-of-the-century

postcard 

each corner a neat diagonal

where it slipped into four

gold foil triangles in one of those

old-fashioned albums

rarely found anymore except in

attics or estate sales.

Though it has been unoccupied

for so long that 

its snappy awnings are

tattered and faded  

and various rumors circulate 

about the reason

its tall show windows disclose

in semi-dark recess

an array of boxes and baskets, and

even a long counter like you’d see

in a drugstore or ice cream parlor

of days gone by,

apparently no one is about to move in and

lay down the welcome mat

or pack up the contents

and move out.

And in that respect the building

is like the small East Texas town itself:

something always seems

about to change there, but

nothing ever really does.

For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.