poems
The Hero That I Know
I believed in you today,
in what you battle.
With admiration I observed your appearance
after you returned from the long combat.
I believed in myself when I looked at you.
Gazing into your privileged soul
made me forget the prolonged [...]
Through Molasses
Through sticky, thick molasses, he dragged his spirit
Up from the depths of desired death
To the surface strands by the watery shores
Where she hiccupped from too much crying
Over a man she once thought of as her lover.
Anger over the loss of what she did [...]
Medusa’s Mariachi Band – Live from Hazleton, Pennsylvania
A Poem of Immigration
by Maria Jacketti
Invocation
Come, Clio, history’s doyenne,
nun of Alexandria, tabloid-scroll of truth.
On this mountain of cracked coal,
far from golden ages,
we move closer to the end of the long count,
the new Earth,
all of [...]
Rod Stroked Survival with a Deadly Hammer
Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the bunch in her pocket was a winner or the slots were a redeemer;
but life itself was not real that was strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin
Mental Institution.
She gambled her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud [...]
Mother, Edith, at 98
Edith, in this nursing home
blinded with macular degeneration,
I come to you with your blurry
eyes, crystal sharp mind,
your countenance of grace−
as yesterday’s winds
I have chosen to consume you
and take you away.
“Oh, where did Jesus disappear
to”, she murmured,
over and over again,
in a low voice
dripping words
like a leaking faucet:
“Oh, there He is my
Angel of the coming.”
Gingerbread Lady
Gingerbread lady,
no sugar or cinnamon spice;
years ago arthritis and senility took their toll.
Crippled mind moves in then out, like an old sexual adventure
blurred in an imagination of fingertip thoughts.
Who in hell remembers the characters?
There was George, her lover, near the bridge at the Chicago River:
she missed his funeral; her friends were there.
She always made feather-light [...]
Charley Plays a Tune (version 2)
Crippled with arthritis
and Alzheimer’s,
in a dark rented room,
Charley plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
relieving himself takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn’t forget where the food is stashed at.
He hears bedlam when [...]
Gemini
My brother’s been looking at the stars. That’s
a UFO, he declares. He’s eighteen
to my nine. I believe: He’s bigger
than I am and closer to the truth. He
goes inside to tell the rest of the clan.
I hear him through the kitchen door, back in
the living room. Our parents and [...]
Fire
Tonight the boy who tends the pool
comes to lock up just as I step
from the shower, naked and wet.
Between us, a fogged glass door.
I know his as the hand
that turns the key, but he
does not know this body as mine —
my shape, ambiguous; skin, unlined.
In this hazy light, I could be
the kind of nymph he’d [...]
The End of Childhood
She wakens to a hand
rocking her shoulder,
a muffled word, slips
into folds of clothes
and follows.
She feels the dead space
under the sky, and the layer
of air lying close to the earth,
a blanket of musk
left from summer flowers.
Between her hands
she finds her head, its
heavy, leaden weight
she has to cradle
every hour to stay
conscious of the field,
the [...]
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