Deborah DeNicola Poems

Everyone's seen it. The wooden foot board
of the bed frame, slanted like the ceiling above

with the painting of a showgirl's golden hair
...

looking into the tight skein of skin around your eye,
the folds, a flake, a freckle, that fiftyish
shift in the crows' feet, expanding bends and dents
and shadowed gutters then back to the rich copper,
...

There are broken rosaries in my dreams.
We are up to our knees in murky water and the rain
has been poisoned, sallowing our skin with pesticides.
All your life you've been immunized from risk, waiting
...

We survived
the blast, the reek of burnt
cabbage, putrid clouds, closer
than we suspected.
...

We simply can't stand up, our faces two red berries
glazed together, still damp after love. The way my right eye
studies your left, lines at the temples grinning also. The way
our noses rub like sniffing pups and how my mouth
keeps lolling open, as if to inhale the whole room,
...

Years before pop tops, I was five or six next to my brother
on a redwood bench. I held a can of orange soda
and looked through the triangle my Mother's church key bent.
I thought the spot of sun inside was a sailboat, loved
...

I was not alarmed when the doves continued to coo
though their wings were burning.

I was on fire too.
It was morning. I was there
...

in the sculpted mantle to his hut. Scarlet
saris on the brown-skinned women,
of course. Terracotta dust he recalls from graves
in Pere La Chaise. Roses on the Left Bank, red
...

She's leaning up in the island of her bed,
knees flung open through her French cut teddy
as if she had expected his arrival
...