Category: Poetry

A wax egg and water

Morning cupola,
I clay.
Shape of a sprout,
My bright canvas
Is a stream, a still.
I am non-tongued, but inner.
I am learning how to breathe as water.

– Anna Smetanenko…

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the etymology of the word illness,
or ill, traces back to the old Norse
word for evil. during her treatment
for cancer, my mother had fevered
dreams of stabbing, of murdering really,
her own waste after they removed
her necrotic colon and fixed a bag
to her hip. a hospital therapist
questioned her and deemed the dreams
suicidal ideation. they strapped her arms
to the bedframe for the remainder of the day.

beauty is that which returns us
to innocence. i admire too much that
which, like a poem, risks its own obscurity.
i drank to avoid dreams and escape the unreal.
which one is ill, and therefore evil,
the affliction or the afflicted? someone
once told me that the eyes, in the dark,
with the eyelids closed, still make
every effort to see.…

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All day long my phone has been ringing.
Like an insect rubbing its legs together
to sing. Calls coming in from area codes
I don’t recognize. No one there when I answer.
All day long it has been ringing.
Like a bird who only remembers one song.
I miss the days when it could be quieted
by gently placing it back in its cradle
instead of having to stab at it with my finger
over and over again. No one there when I answer.
It didn’t used to be like this. I used to sleep
through the night. Not now. Now I wake up
every two hours thinking I hear my mother
thumping her cane on the floor after a fall,
and when I open my eyes I never recognize
the room I’m in.…

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……………………..The garden abandoned, soil hardened
…………..to brick, the seasons of my mother’s hearted cabbage
blown by full and quick as a song.

……………………..Once she fed me, and once I was young
…………..enough to be fed. My bowl now waits
blank as a page, porcelain made of bone ash

……………………..and brittle teeth. Here memory I pull along,
…………..red slatted wagon I can’t cut loose.
But where else is there to look?  Bodies gone

……………………..cold, my hands even colder, the cursive
…………..of her hair on the pillow a fortune
I can’t decipher. Some people glide toward their fates

……………………..like a bride through a bloomed trellis.

I press my lips to their trains.

– Sandra Yee…

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Distancing – Week Five
The Neighbor

I have never been in my neighbor’s back garden. I find the gate in the alley

barricaded by recycle bins. A grape-clustered clematis blooms on the fence.

She steps back, allows me to enter after she has moved everything. I take a

chair in the grass. She takes the chair on the patio. I’ve brought my own tea.

A single Cecile Brunner blooms. A variegated osier muscles its way out of a

bed. Compliments are given, complaints are made. Two women on a spring

morning sitting six feet apart hold their worlds together.

A leaf blower blasts
obscenities – we lean closer
to hear ourselves…

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Flip a skirt hem and you have a lip
to cradle tomatoes or questions
or a bit of weather, make-do wings
for the wrangling of life’s loose change,
which is to say I lied
about calling a truce. Enough with locks
and keys. We each need more pockets
to hide those broken parts
of ourselves to be shared only
under a moonless sky. What I bared
and what I bore were twice the dare
I could afford. With you my knees
were forever hinged in remorse
and ecstasy. Water flows down
the easiest path. Icarus
could have fashioned himself a raft,
but who lunges for the sun dreaming
of caution? You could call me
abandoned or merely shipwrecked
on a fickle shore. Here I am
gilding my store of feathers, courting
lost oarsmen and begging
for a storm.…

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You disappeared quicker than I could watch. 
Who would have thought gravity faster than
light, fire from the stars we know already
two hundred and fifty years behind, not
able to compete with the satellites
passing above the place where we lay on
the equatorial line, staring at the heavens. 
All through the night they traced our
sleeping as if following a magnet,
orbits slowly degrading, a limited
number of concentric circles, while they
signaled, mapped, tracked, escaping atmosphere
to briefly return, disintegrating.

– Sandra Kolankiewicz

Author’s Note: This poem is about a disintegrating romantic relationship. We went to Chang Mai in 1990 and trekked up near the Burmese border to a village where were to get on a bamboo raft and paddle back towards Chang Mai.  …

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