Category: Poetry

Once in a Lifetime

Posted on by Rocco

 
A young peasant farmer in his father’s best.
His skin, the texture
of spring bark
brushes against a starched white
collar. His face beams, and his wife
stands next to him, the expression
on her separate wind-burnt face
saying she’s lost something. The borrowed
polyester dress she wears
stretches across her shoulder blades
as she poses with the baby boy
on her hip. He is travel-weary
and crying, and in her village dialect
she shushes him, then shakes him.

Over their shoulders, Mao awaits,
his gaze meeting the lens dead on.
The passer-by with their camera
is waiting as well and the boy
won’t stop crying, just
doesn’t understand why
they’ve come all this way.

 

As appeared in the chapbook collection Catching Dawn’s Breath, Lyricalmiracle Press, Toronto, 2008.

 

 

 

Boarding Call

Posted on by Rocco

 

The wiping of our mouths,
the fidgeting of fingers,
betray our greatness,
a mother and son at a table,
in the polished calamity
of an airport, sipping coffee
from little paper cups.

We tremble over dirt roads
and wedding stories towards
the boarding call. We resonate
with fights about old curfews
and messy rooms that almost
make it past the nervous grace
in our lips.

When the announcement hits
we look at each other, finally,
then rise up like shipwrecks
full of grandeur, and at this moment
money is nothing, rolls of bills,
promises, and writing on bits of paper
float between us.

Our embrace is a submergence,
the noise pressed from us, then
the aching pull, the tender lull
when you let me go, knowing
I’ve held something back;
and what I’ve kept I hope
will keep me afloat.

 
As appeared in the collection Leaning into the Mountain (Fooliar Press)

 

 

Namdaemun Sestina

Posted on by Rocco

Seoul, South Korea

 
Across from the waxed pig heads,
mothers and daughters gather at carts
loaded with assorted clothes.
Elbows deep, they churn up colours
while old ladies, rapped in fabric, sit on stools,
poised above red clay pots filled

with kimchi and large silver bowls filled
with silver minnows. Above our heads
UN flags hang from strings. Below, on stools
booth owners gather by music carts.
Cigarettes dangle and pop music colours
the sun swinging amid bars of designer clothes.

I am walking , and men are shouting and waving clothes
above their wagon loads, bending their tongues to the air filled
and turning with spice and meat and colours.
The sky turns the voices about our heads,
under the shoes of men stomping on carts,
and through the fabric of ladies poised on stools.

I walk, and though the men might rest on stools,
drinking deep the voice that fills their clothes,
these streets draw sky like the wheels of carts.
I breath, and my life is drawn about a lake filled
with twilight. We are the stars forming about our heads.
Poised in a tin boat, our whispers draw the colours

of skin as we shed our clothes submerge the colours
into the fabric of these ladies, poised on stools
breathing the sleep of children, whose heads
are cradled in the hands of fathers haggling over clothes.
Their dreams gathering the voice of memories filled
with men who chant from clothing carts,

music that crackles from music carts
and all the spice and meat and sewage and colours
turning the air about me into a single breath filled
with the stillness of the men resting on stools.
Sweat is soaked into the fabric of their clothes
an entire street is drawn up into their heads.

In a food tent, there are some empty stools.
Under the canopy, I can watch the colours
submerge into a lake of twilight, drifting above our heads.

 

 
As appeared in Freefall, Vol. XVI No. 2, 2006.