Poems

When, after my mother burnt the lasagna,
after my father remarked, You’ve burnt

 our dinner again! Mom rose from the table,
asked me Want to go to the beach? No one

could swim the ocean like my mother.
I watch her feet drown in the sandy bottom,

her shoulders dip under the waves.
Her head bobs up and her body sinks

into the rhythmic reaching strokes of a languid
crawl. Breathing is all that matters.

Unlike me. I pose, worship the sun, walk
the line between dry and wet, pick up shells.

Which is better? Keep. Discard. I cannot float.
I hold my head high, jerking from side to side.

Why couldn’t Dad just eat around the burnt edges?
She emerges out of the calmed sea into the pink-

purple evening glow. Her shoulders chrome shiny,
a sprig of seaweed in her hair. Ready to go home?

I’m astonished at my parents’ cleaving
to their own secret language of love. He offers

her a bowl brimming with rum-raisin ice cream.
They nestle together on the couch.

My son asks, How’s your other son?
which means, How’s Boris?
my pet cockatoo, a dinosaur born
out of the oldness of the world.

I pour water into a stainless bowl,
drop almonds in another. He toddles
up to me, mirrors my swaying back
and forth before he lowers his head
for me to tousle his yellow crown.

Who understands what caring for
another creature fully entails?

My son’s ear presses against his phone,
listens as I speak of long days filled
with daily chores, going to stores,
teaching Boris how to speak English,
how to whistle Beethoven’s Fifth
and Hava Nagila. After Boris shreds
pages from the New York Times
that line his cage, he translates
my deep evening sighs into
a low growl.

Boris asks in a voice identical
to mine, How ya doin’? then
answers, All right, Mr. Bird,
as if to reassure us that someday
my son will treasure the oldness
of our world – Tolstoy, Mussorgsky

and Boris – maybe out of fondness
for the resonance of my voice.
But one day my little dinosaur
may echo my son’s speech,
whistle his songs. If my son
listens to his own voice
will he know his inheritance?

This prose poem serves as a prelude to my Keep/Discard chapbook.

One
The Moon’s milk spoons over men and women, some entangled under brambleberry bushes, some supine on golden Egyptian sheets. Around your mouth, a fine lace of wrinkles, the feathers of gladness. Before you spindle off into an inky sleep, this is the time of the good night kiss. These are dark hours for me to write,

claw back the curvature of time to the moment my teenage grandfather Milton thought I like the look of her, smelled her brown hair, and when she made no objection, the ripple they created was heard only by the earth’s ear, the sound of a bird chirping. Later, she nestled my father in a wicker basket, pinned the tag Milton to his blanket, and left him on his grandparents’ oak table. Holding the door with her fingers, she softened its blow.

Two
Dressed in extravagant robes, lovers bend together as if they are sound waves of music. They kneel in the fragrant meadow of violets, sundrops, and larkspur in Klimt’s The Kiss. His hands hold the sweet bones of her head as the ridge of his brow, his blunt cheekbone press against her impassive face, her eyelids closed in a gold leaf dream.

Perhaps not unlike my maternal grandmother Alice who wanted to believe if she could play the piano at Carnegie Hall, my grandfather George would crave her splayed fingers caressing the bones of his spine. But her hair wasn’t flaxen, her cheekbones too high, and he, with an unanchored heart, moved between his second wife and her, his part-time home. Until he died. Then, she banged Rhapsody in Blue on her upright piano, vowed not to tell their young children she was his mistress.

Three
In the first photograph of my parents Milton, Jr. and Beatrice, my father’s right arm braces my mother, his student, as she stands on ice skates. His head leans towards her and he smiles, but at sixteen her gaze is off-camera. She knows a kiss could ruin a life.

For them, a rice shower, a tiara of white roses in her chestnut hair. He takes her hand; holds open the door of his black Chevrolet coupe. What a comfort he must have been to her on that first night, after she discovered her parents never married his parents too. Their bodies fused together as if carved from a block of cream-colored limestone, their arms and hands almost flattened to fit around each other, strands of their hair united into a single arc of time that stretches taut – the exquisite and the undeserved moments –

relaxes back into the mousy brown tendrils of my hair that you love. Time for me to slide under the soft flap of sheet, inhale the scent I love when you’re wearing nothing else, how you touch the tip of my spine, how I lean in to kiss your marmalade mouth.

                           This is not about a woman
climbing up the volcanic wall of Santorini
where life clings to the hollow of its circular
edge.  Or about how they lived in a white-

                           washed house, their windows
shuttered from the sun as he read mysteries to her,
his voice caressing her ears. Which could mean
all they desired was the warm glow of Amstel

                           beer, the smell of tomatoes,
black olives and goat cheese. Maybe this is
the part where he could only hear the chains
ringing from a priest’s incense burner. Hot

                           with embers, smoke seething
from its closed lid. The part about her disbelief
when he said he didn’t hear the tinkling of bells
that tattled she was coming, which means

                           all she knew was hunger.
This might also be about how she dreamed of
Manet’s Olympia sitting on ruffled white satin
cushions wearing only gold earrings and a bracelet.

                           About wearing an oval bauble
dangling from the black ribbon tied in a bow
at the front of her neck. The part about the look
in his dark almond-shaped eyes attracting

                           the blue light of her eyes.
But not about how they yawned and stretched
then strolled, each on their own, until his voice
no longer touched her ears. This might be about

                           her yielding of lips. About how
she once thought her shoulder could only fit
in his shoulder’s hollow.

Borderline Love Wordrunner eChapbooks 2021.

Perhaps you could have stayed after the night of broken glass
when men shattered your windows, panes like the jaw

of a jaguar, fangs hanging from lintels, sticking up from sills.
Their shoulders bore the ink-stain of barbed wire spider webs.
They gave you one day to sweep away the splinters and decide.

Would you have stayed because the mist-soaked forest
was the only shelter your forefathers have ever known?

Under silent mahogany trees, your brood would flail their limbs
as if they were twigs in the brown river while the basilisks,
their feet webbed just enough, walked on water.

Your bloodline flows north with the humming birds through
coyote country to a place where your family will ride by bus,

pass Return-to-Sender signs to a corrugated steel settlement.
Tracking bracelets, thin and flexible like the ones butterflies wear,
will be fastened to your wrists.

One day in school your progeny will read that Anne and her parents
left their home after Kristallnacht and learn that kindness persists.

So if the north wind withers the honeysuckle,
and your children find a painted turtle, its back broken
along double yellow lines, still glass shards sparkle

in asphalt. You might say to your offspring,
There in the road – do you see them? Count the stars!

Pilgrimage Injustice & Protest Issue 2016
Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest South Jersey Culture & History Center 2021

I saw you watch another woman lower her head
             to the splash of a water fountain as if you were tasting
                           the merlot of her lips. From the hollow of your throat –
                                                                               I’m sorry, and I thought

as long as we kept running, me on the cushioned track at the gym,
             you on the treadmill in the musk-riddled air,
                           we could still scuttle around the tennis court,
                                                                               shout love to one another.

But fear is an earth-bound creature,
             and the crook of my knees lift my weight up
                       the stair climber like a marionette.
                                                                                   Nautilus. Naughty us.

If hummingbirds can fly in reverse, take me
             around the world so fast time dilates, and you’ll think,
                           in contrast to your friends,
                                                                               I’m in pretty good shape.

Glide your hand over the small of my back, my hips, my thighs,
             the curvature of time. Let’s float backwards as crayfish do,
                           out of the dangerous daylight, slip under
                                                                               the lace-fringed tide.

Barely South Spring 2019
Is It Hot in Here, Or Is It Just Me? Social Justice Anthologies 2020

I spent most of the war preoccupied with the study of ballet and the habit of watching on the Nightly News soldiers drag body bags out of the jungle, heave them onto helicopters. Then I’d settle into bed humming, with my transistor radio and Marvin Gaye singing What’s Going On?  The answer was to escalate, and my boyfriend registered with the Selective Service, a lottery that chose more and more men to go to war. I began to study the laws of probability and the cartography of Canada. Vivid to me was the blood stain of a Marine’s suicide on my college library floor. Vivid to me were the stories of enlisted men, who stood randomly on the right side of a room and went to Ankara or Ramstein while their buddies were sent to Da Nang or Camranh Bay. I should have studied the cartography of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. When I was small I studied Germany, that half a country my war-weary father helped to liberate. Now I touch the shoulder of my husband’s flight suit at the back of the closet, listen to his stories of how the supply of tetracycline for STDs would always run out, how he stitched up Viet Cong prisoners only for them to be sent back across the perimeter. His voice hesitates as he recalls recording fairy tales on cassette tapes for his children. His eyes tear like my father’s.

Open Door Magazine August 2021