On an Off Day
If you feel beside yourself,
be careful what you do.
Watch your language, watch your step
and hold the door for you.
Barbara Lydecker Crane has published three chapbooks, Zero Gravitas (White Violet Press, 2012), ALPHABETRICKS (for children, Daffydowndilly Press, 2013), and BackWords Logic (Local Gems Press, 2017). She has won the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest and the Humor Award and a Laureate’s Choice Award in the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest, and was a finalist for the Rattle Readers’ Choice Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Atlanta Review, First Things, Light, Measure, and Think Journal, among many others, and in several anthologies. Also an artist, she lives with her husband in the Boston area.