Heaven with Others
Bingo. Crazy 8's. This on a 3x5
notecard: try more eggwhite in devil's food
cake. Francine's hand—Francine? Gone,
gone. Heaven? Heaven
will replace us
with its own profundities—
discerning that autumn
or spring wasted casually
while the trouble of life kept turning
over incidentals, like leaves.
Foisting children on us
and then retreating.
What does "Harquebus" mean?
Or the foul—breathed cat who used to frisk
the screens of lower windows toppling
my cucumber cactus—
what was its name? Rudy, Rudolph? A word
is manna from Heaven—
Brigitte, Esther, Rutherford—gone, as gone
as those pancakes I poured water on in my dreams.
When there is no such thing—
God bless us all—
What is 9x7? If I remember
I wake, pierced to the gut
by what my mind
conjures instead. The sunroom! Why am I
standing in the sunroom?
I haven't been standing
in the sunroom
for years.
A Sandwich as an Institution
For my father
And now you're frightened, sitting
in the gated yard at twilight
as, across the way, children screech
for a beachball descending, then
scatter like Jays.
I imagine you slowly turning
the key on
a can of sardines
inside the green glare of TV news.
You've shrunk. Your silhouette
is the map of Florida
you're hunched over—
your own reef. Then, the old woman
bent herself, as earlier
over shuffleboard,
that nice one, Ruth, "a tad talky,"
who made you a sandwich once,
knocks at the screen. You feign sleep.
She knocks harder. It's hot and you
are polite as ever even
though what she hands you
is not the sandwich
you remember. It is not
the sandwich you dreamed.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
November, 2009
Poems
Barbara Molloy
Barbara Molloy's first book, "In Favor of Lightning," was published by Wesleyan University Press. Molloy was the publisher and editor of Words and Pictures Magazine from 2004 to 2007. Utne named this journal one of the best new magazines of 2007. She has two new manuscripts, both of which are looking for a home.