Self-Portrait As Midwestern Grocery Store
As beautiful as an aisle of Jell-o
I am radiant orange, lemon-lime, blue raspberry, and green
grape. I am the entire Garden of Eden in box form,
a powder of pomegranates and apples and I am always
ready for the deli meat section.
The butterball is the only way
I ever want to think of a turkey
and not the wisdom on the face of the old
hen who would perch herself on a weather vane
in my backyard to remind me
to watch my children
who often wander too close to the forest.
And maybe I’m not cut out
for the real world or the fresh produce
section, which makes sense because I was born
right after Chornobyl exploded. And now
I’m in the candle aisle again
and I just can’t leave. A place of smells
where we replace reality with what we
think it should be, cucumber melon,
lilac spring, vanilla sugar cookie, the smell
of the funeral home where you planned
your grandfather’s wake
cedar and sweet caramel.
The warm baloney sandwich
he unwrapped from his pocket
the day you found out
he was leaving his body behind.
Light Crimes, a Love Story
It was our second week in the United States and my mother needed to learn how to drive so she could get a job mopping floors. My father borrowed a white van from the community center where he mopped floors and boiled spaghetti on Italian night. And maybe you don’t see it at first but this story is romantic. The middle of the night, two young immigrants in love in an alleyway, matching leather jackets, and my mother’s red lips shining in the moonlight? No, not shining but radiating like a neon sign that said open. Did she scratch the car on purpose or was she unsure of how to parallel park? The answer didn’t matter because the next day my sleepless father followed the driving test instructor. Noted the 25 feet marked by orange cones and knew he could not teach my mother how to place a vehicle between them. You see she was not born to fit into arbitrary spaces, she needed room for her hair and her eyes and her voice that my father often says fills a room like an ocean fills a fish tank, immediately until everyone is drowning in beauty. Instead, he committed some light crimes and moved the cones minutes before her turn to take the driving test. And listen, I know you want me to tell you whether or not she passed or whether or not my father was arrested, but all I can say is that she wore her fur coat and aviator sunglasses that day, and my father watched her from that borrowed van thinking she looked technicolor, an American movie star playing the role of a woman with no way to return home.
Instead of Ascending
after Gerald Stern
I was going to write a poem
where I make love to the fields.
I would note that the dandelions
just need someone to blow them
and that grass was best when wet and
bowed over in pleasure
but instead of ascending
into the world of the pastoral
I will behave like a Jew
and mourn the dead bird
in my driveway. A fledgling
who had fallen out of its nest
pushed out by invaders, by those
who would erase its song and
tiny dancing wings. I laid down
next to her and saw the sky how
she saw it. Empty of anything
worth writing about except
of course, the body
of her mother.
