Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Umbrella in 2010

Frida Holds A White Rabbit

like a baby. She doesn't 

smile for the camera, 

as she cradles 

el conejo blanco,

como un bebe, in her arms,

the white rabbit of her longing

like the infant she never carried to term,

the fat white conejo of infidelity,

little effigy of Diego, its flat contented face

so much like his: the barren 

moonscape of his apology.

She looks tired.

She rests her head on her hand,

her mouth a small horizon in the shadows

She is thinking about the engorged 

conejo of his politics,

the fuzzy impersonality of his vision,

the little female comrades in his murals.

Where is her anger? 

Does it leap through the agave now

swift as the jackrabbit of Tehuantepec? 

Does it burn in the desert?

No because el fuego de Frida’s

resentment is gone for good.

No more galloping around here,

keeping up with the horses.

No more bites on the cheek

for you, you selfish rider!

Frida’s just plain worn out.

She’s taken el conejo back,

and she’s holding him like the baby he is.

Frida squeezes him so close

he’s short of breath. Come on,

smile for the camera, Frida. Smile,

as two crows fly above your eyes.

After the photograph: “Frida Kahlo With A White Rabbit,

Blue House, Coyoacan, Mexico City”

1949 by Hector Garcia

Tuesday Poem: previously published online by Fox Chase Review in 2009

 
City Just Before Dusk  

In the turning down of the day

the light folds like clean white sheets,

swagging across whole groups of buildings,

so great sections of the city glow,

bright as a Pre-Raphaelite angel’s face,

as he announces another coming of twilight.

Then stringy clouds pull everything horizontal,

fill the sky, as if the atmosphere’s

stretching itself after a cat nap,

so whole neighborhoods rub their eyes in half
tones of charcoal blue, as Vincent’s views of rain,

through the window of a Saint Rémy asylum, do.

In all of this we see night awakening

like the baby newly baptized,

and called for the first time by name.

Close by, his parents watch him

wriggle in the arms of the priest,

both of their hearts aflame.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Summer 2008

  Sunflowers

Vincent understood them: the way they yield

their darkling faces to the sun,

aflame for its arcing shimmer dance

across the day’s mysterious expanse,

how big they are, how weighty, over grown,

the way they lean together in the fields,

conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan

as their heads reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.

He gathered them in vases, painted
their petaled fall from grace,

bunched together, shy, askew
and awkward, out of place,

caught their surprise at being indoors,
the droop and shrug of leaves,

the way they suddenly dropped,
losing all of their color.

Too painful to paint them
riotous at the roadside in full bloom:

signs of what we were before
the crows moved in to feed.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Philadelphia Stories in 2007

Philadelphia Fog

It gathers in puffs outside the windows,

until even the tallest buildings,

hunched as they are near the river,

slip away like memories do

when you get older,

so you’re not sure whether

they ever really happened.

Maybe you dreamed them.

The Ben Franklin Bridge,

with its big sweeps of light

and delicate spider web curves,

erased too, like chalk on a board,

or chalk effaced by a field of chalk.

The city becomes mythology then:

a story we all agree to believe,

a creature in metamorphosis,

that old ghost, we've seen
many times, both fearsome
and genial, haunting the waterfront.

We curl inside our prisons
surrounded by nothing other than white,

worried we too might soon disappear:

like herds of tiny ancient beasts,

or schools of fish being gobbled whole

by this great white hunger

as big as a snow’s.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2010

                                                                    Ghost Flock by Alasdair Wallace

Heart of Washington Square 

When the birds fall

out of the trees behind you,

light as a cloud, when they lift in an arc,

wheel and bank right over the man you love,

as he stubbornly sits on a bench in the sun,

reading his book, while you hunch on another one

in the shade, preferring to take

the dimmer view, until those tiny wings

take flight, and your spirits rise up when they do,

as you will soon, conceding to a clearly cosmic

connection, the sparrows, their sheer velocity,

like Cupid’s arrows shot between you,

affirming that incongruous as the two of you

may be: red dwarf, white giant, ashiver, ablaze,

written by light, gently bathed in ink,

you’re part  of the same constellation, linked.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version appeared in Poems of Awakening, edited by Betsy Small in 2010

from Small Benedictions

Bless the torn

part of each day,

the ruptures in us

that caused it

to tear where it did.

Bless the green

heart of each rupture,

the small green

kernel of hope

saved for replanting.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in BlueFifth Review in 2007

  

First Sonnet

When the family crowded into the Summer Street kitchen

I was all hers for a while: belting out God Bless America,

cheeks aglow, loud as Kate Smith on the Ed Sullivan show,

or the special birthday song we learned from Big John and Sparky

on the little Bakelite radio. Tucked tight within her arms I basked

in her smile, the cloud of her powder scent and smoky breath,

what I’d later know to be bliss, afloat on the feel of her lips

on my cheek, her drawn out kiss, as the aunts and uncles laughed

and clapped for us both. Most of the time it was more like

I was a mouse, eclipsed by the whirr and squeak of the clothesline,

the whish whish whish of the scrub brush in her fist, a pest,

a maker of dirt underfoot, scuttling around the house, furtive

and filthy as soot: watching her from the corners, struggle against

the enormity of her unhappiness, and the awful swelling of the mess.