Category: Other People’s Poetry

No Answer

by Judith Steinbergh

This is the third time this week
I’ve tried calling you
down under the ground.
This has got to stop.
I know you don’t pick up the phone
in fact, there’s no number listed,
but this connection we’ve had for years
first umbilical
lately over the wires is hard to break.
Who else cares about the kids’ first day of school
or my electric bill.
I phone you up in the heavens
but it’s no dice.
I’m not into the afterlife
and your burial pursues me
without mercy,
I know you’re down there
MA
answer me.

Sonnet 11

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

 

Pablo Neruda

by guest poet Luciano Iacobelli 

Mother rolled her own dough
and made her own pasta.
The sauce, produce from backyard tomatoes,
simmered daily on the elements.
Little read splotches covered the stove top.

She couldn’t understand
why I rejected the home cooking:
tired of the food I’d known all my life,
I ate sandwiches in restaurants.

But one Sunday afternoon, I stayed home
and stared at her as she shelled peas,
stared at the light reflecting
off the metal bowl, stared around the kitchen,
at the arrangement of utensils, and thought to myself,
my God, what a picture this is!
When my mother wasn’t looking,
I dipped my finger in the sauce
and an old appetite returned.

That same day she complained of an ache.
A few weeks later we were told the worst.
A few months more, she was
an emaciated memory.

After the funeral, I sat on the back porch
and my grief was a bright red geranium,
the weeds were the garden’s condolence,
the morning glories clung desperately
to the railing, and I was hungry for the meals
I had once refused to eat.

As appears in Luciano Iacobelli’s The Angel Notebook (Seraphim Editions: Hamilton, 2007). Luciano Iacobelli can be reached through his website at http://www.lyricalmyricalpress.com/