| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
MY PHILOMEL J.S. Lange (Runatyr) THE FLAVOR OF BALONEY Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett) GOD, SATAN AND ELVIS Julie Mazza (TornScorpio)
She won’t listen to Chopin.
She looks young, so young, despite her years.
The Parkinson’s keeps her from playing anymore
and she’s wounded with the press of each key.
It sounds like an empty promise, she tells me.
She makes love to me, note by note.
Days turn to months.
She can’t bear the silence hanging in the air.
Speakers flare out a supernova balm.
She's always been young.
It’s been so long since she’s heard it,
and now her face takes on an other-worldly glow
as her tortured lips turn up in a betwitched smile,
soft grey eyes growing quiet.
Her trembling fingers sing me to sleep.
Months turn to years.
The urn up on the wall
reminds me how little time there is to play with.
I won’t listen to Chopin.
She’s on my mind
and I can’t bear the sense of
intimacy her music brings me
only to leave me with nothing to embrace
but a bittersweet memory.
She plays in Warsaw, in my dreams.
Days turn to months.
I can’t bear the silence hanging in the air.
I let her medicine fill the room.
She’s on my mind,
now more than ever
and as I listen to Nocturne No. 9
she’s with me forever,
and glorious,
the music plays on after I go to sleep.
My mom contrived so many lunches
in her life: oh, countless sandwiches,
redeeming day-old bread and half-price
cold-cuts -- brightened here and there by
on-sale olives or potato chips, a bowl
of heated Campbell's soup -- doctored with
a boost of Red Hot sauce, or half-and-half --
a plastic glass of milk, all followed
by a dollop of ice cream and splash
of Hershey’s syrup and ‘Cool Whip’ --
put in cups the day before, retrieved from
overnight deep freeze: offered as
the careful predetermined gift it was.
When the machine of her ran down to slow,
drifting more towards Stop than Go,
I took the can opener and knife and
spread, assembled, opened, heated,
organized the lunch for her instead -- each
day until the day that she was dead. Today,
just now, I opened my refrigerator, put
three slices of a ham I didn’t get on sale
on gourmet bread that wasn’t stale,
remembering, and wondering. What she
had so assiduously saved has come to me.
And for a long and savored moment now
I’ve missed the flavor of baloney.
the eclipsing song keeps me
steady as I lay face down
thighs exposed waiting for God or Satan
or Elvis to take me
in my half asleep Sunday morning trance
the tears at the foot of the bed are yours
and I realize now how a mockingbird’s hymn puts
human voices away like
shoeboxes into the back of a closeted mind
my thoughts sinking deep
threadbare carpet deep
keeping it steady
keeping myself alive
by the chroma of naked
sound
my pulse
now organic
(thank you love)
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