wobble

by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger

As Earth’s axis leans lazily back from the Sun,  

in easy duality North and South Poles  

diametrically tug at Earth’s in-between.  

Molten iron rises toward crusty outer skin,  

then oozes back toward center, making Poles shimmy  

and shift, their movement teasing magnets and maps.  

As glaciers and polar ice soften, melt,  

move as liquid through surging seas,  

our spinning orb wobbles, jounces  

and judders, unsteadily trundles  

through space and time. Like a tottering toddler,  

puffy, pliant legs quaking, vibrating,  

straining to move through the world. Like the jittering  

of hand-cranked film, or the doddering, jiggling snow  

just before the avalanche plummets, carpeting the valley  

in suffocatingly shimmering glitter. Like my mother,  

when her comfortable, overstuffed-chair world  

quivered, when her brain wobbled and wept,  

when the life she sought  

became the life she dreaded,  

when her daughters, polar opposites,  

became her North Star.  

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger’s poems reflect both natural and constructed worlds, often describing interactions with family and friends. Her regular essays on poetry appear in Blue House Journal, and her poems have been published in District Lines, Thimble Literary, Blue House Journal, Green Light and Paper Dragon, and in four anthologies of Yorkshire poetry. Her prize-winning collection of Yorkshire sonnets was launched in Britain 2021 at the Fourth Ripon Poetry Festival. Shari is on the board of Alice James Books (alicejamesbooks.org), a poetry press committed to producing, promoting, and distributing poetry that engages the public on important social issues. She lives, writes and rides her bicycle in Washington, DC.