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: previously published in the anthology, Paterson: A Poet's City, in 2005

                                                Dialogue, 2011 by Liliana Porter

Paterson, New Jersey: The Girls 

On Cedar and Summer Streets

had names like songs,

like arias in fact,

that rose and fell

in handfuls of confetti

across the sun.

Santa and Rosa,

tucked like a holy picture inside your missal,

Teresa, Angela, Gracia,

church bell glitter falling

like the angels as they sing us into evening,

Sylvia, Stella, Maria

gleaming in moonlight.

Immaculata Concepcione! 

Palmyra! Preciosa!

Like hymns the mother’s voices

rang down the sidewalk

and girls we called Connie and Pam and Sina

dropped the end of the jump rope

and became a soft percussion of steps,

a murmur of acquiescence,

the creak of a screen door.

Christiana who got to watch the nuns eat in the convent

because her mother cooked for them,

Carmella carrying altar lace,

Caterina celestial in her wedding cake Sunday dresses,

Cosmina and Mariana graceful as boats adrift at sea.

All of them except me.

Ei -----leen !

My mother bellowed,

with an emphasis on the “eye”,

her voice at full tilt,

rain-lashed and battered

as the Irish cliffs in a storm,

smoky as their pubs every night of the week.

The street went silent all of a sudden,

As the girls I turned my back on made the sign of the cross,

and I took the longest way home I could.