Deborah DeNicola Poems

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,
...

There was a presence before the stone.
A pressure so much larger than human
wounds. My mind let go into the crags
of sorrow and I grew
...

Lord, life after half a century drags a Uhaul behind it.
A truck load of possessions that don’t love me back.
...

Hardly a thing I can hold in my hand.
But I recall my small hand
on the polished mahogany table
out on the sun porch where I sometimes
...

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.
...

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
...