​POETRY  -  
​With a Theme of Time 

"drumming her fingers on the kitchen counter"

​                           Photo by Weebly                                 

Time Is Marching On
by MaryLee McNeal

My mother said it often, drumming her fingers on the kitchen counter, tapping her foot, offering names for me: day-dreamer, slowpoke. Doodler was my favorite—the ooo of it—used when her mood was light. Her need for haste and mine for a long gaze meant years of irritation. Fast-forward to these numbered days: bootbeats of time tripping over themselves. She’s long gone. The only way to keep her is the way she warned against. I make myself ten again. She is drumming her fingers. I search her eyes above her wry mouth, finding the glint of withheld humor, hoping for doodler, slow-poking, cruising through memory, refusing to march.

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MaryLee McNeal is retired from teaching. Her stories and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Bellevue Literary Review and Green Mountains Review. Her novel, Home Again, Home Again won the San Francisco State’s Clark Award in 1989, and her poetry chapbook, The Space Between Us, won the Bear Mountains Press Award in 2002.  A second chapbook of poems, The Way We Fall, with an introduction by Jack Hirschman, was published in 2014. She is seeking publication for a second novel, Saint Kate’s, revising a manuscript of linked stories, and recently enjoyed her first OLLI classes in memoir and poetry with Kathleen McClung.

​Editor's note: MaryLee McNeal is a first-time contributor to Vistas & Byways  

Other works in this issue:
Nonfiction:
​ Memory
Poetry:
 Advice to the Aging Self

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