A DAY FOR LOT’S WIFE

In the city park, ashen fog rises from iron grates
and yellow maples shoot up
through squares dug out of concrete.
Business people come here
mostly to eat their Big Al’s pizza
or take a short cut to Broadway,
or just to sit
and stare at the arched windows.
Children huddle around a granite bench.
Boys poke a frog to jump,
stuff its mouth with firecrackers,
light the string, and with each pop
the girls run screaming, hands to their ears.

Your younger daughters run.
You turn,
hot air closes in on you like a lid.
Your nostrils, the spaces between
your teeth fill with salt.
Etched in your hips’ hollows,
traces of your married
daughters left behind. You pray:
Scatter my body over my daughters’ bodies
so I may collect like a kiss
on the backs of their necks once more.

The sun drops an orange-yellow sheen
over the street, between
trees and benches, narrows
at the steps of what was once called
Liberty Park. A man holds a camera.
Another man holds a sign – You can’t evict an idea.

In Gentileschi’s painting of Lot and His Daughters,
voluptuous young women dressed in gold and red
lounge together. Your bronze bowl and silver pitcher
lie at their feet.
Lot buries his head.
His daughters look back
not in horror
but in concentration,
naming the brown clouds moving
across the vesper sky – dog, crab, pig.

San Pedro River Review