Category: Poetry

Smells
John Barrale

I remember the bittersweet smell
of my mother’s lipstick
melting in its gold cartridge
when we went to Coney Island,

and how the glossy burst of sun was like a poster
when we walked out of the subway station—

and how, riding home, I slept
in her suntan-oiled arms,

and the smell of the sea,
so old and fertile,
rose like a ghost
from the sand-wet bottom of my pail,

and how after she died,
the lonely cigarette and onion sweat
of my father
would wake me
for school in the morning.

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Hospice
Janet Kolstein

Long ago, in another shelter,
I had raised the shade
in my father’s dying room
to present the backyard’s branches
stripped for winter —
but he was done with nature,

so I pulled the shade back down
as he closed his eyes against the outside,
and his ragged breath
was all that was left.

The Fence of My Indifference

Arthur Russell

When your difficulties jump the fence of my indifference
and I awaken to thoughts of you in dirty bedclothes;
when I look at my fork of food and cannot eat it

and draw ballpoint hash marks on the breakfast paper,
and say your name out loud in the shower,
and later pull weeds as if to clear a landing place for you,

but you don’t come, I recall how we ran down the ramp
to the lower level of Grand Central, and I drew your shadow
in pencil on the whispering wall, but none of that reaches you.

Today, I write the word “hand,” and a hand grows from the paper.
I draw a picture of a hand, and a hand rises from my shading.
I say the word “hand,” and my hand comes down on your shoulder

in the hospital room, and you turn from your silence to see that
I have jumped the fence of my indifference into your difficulties.

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