THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Penelope Scambly Schott



This is a factual fact.
Day by day, it keeps on coming.
Rain. Hail. The winds
that brought branches crashing down.
Three days of darkness.
Three days of cold.
A lighter rain. Flakes
floating. Once
a snippet of blue sky.
But if you weren’t looking,
you missed it.
Another executive order.
New snow on top of dirty snow.
Ice.
It was the ice that was the worst,
paws of the old dog
splaying in four directions.
She looked at me
with baffled accusation.
More and heavier rain.
The saturated hillsides
slipping down the hillsides.
Darlings, where are we going?

Penelope Scambly Schott was awarded four New Jersey arts fellowships before moving to Oregon, where her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. In 2013 she had two books published: Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore. Penelope’s most recent book (2014) How I Became an Historian is a lyric examination of the connections between past and future, both in her family and in the larger world.