Category: Poetry

When she answers
it’s as if

shell pink china chings against saucers as she serves herself another cup and two lips please or I’ll take one or a piece of chocolate pie perhaps and she’s the girl at the tea party all alone absorbed in the discourse of her dolls, so be careful with these cups my dears the china is so thin that it will cut your tongue out if you’re not careful if you’re not very careful
not
very very
careful

her voice is distant slim and reedy as a ballerina spinning on her toes and I wait to see if weight will win and over it will flop like a top scuttling across the hardwood floor it doesn’t stop

her words click like knitting needles pulling yarn around and in around and in until from the waning ball they coax a blanket for her to hide within
or these words they turn like smoke that rises up and out the window up and out and there she goes there she goes she follows

I want to show her an amber ring I love.
Its flaws are called inclusions, breaking
light into pathways for grace
I’ll tell her how:
Like a relic in an altar stone,
pieces of childhood
are wrapped in resinous sap
and buried
beneath the northern ocean
by an earthquake
or an ice age.

But a day will come
after a storm
perhaps
that they will float
one by one
to the surface
of a sunlit sea.

-Kitty Yanson

Perched on his chair,
seated on the edge of wisdom,
his stillness is a flight.
The rest of us laugh about lemon tarts,
their squishy softness like falling
into a woman with open mouth,
eyes shut. I don’t get it, he says.

I want to yell at him.
I want to tell him, for god’s sake, at least
name the dust motes at which you stare:
Ferdinand and Flower, Fred and Wilma,
Bibbitty Bobbitty Boo.

He baits us with breathing.
Tenting his fingers,
he pecks at facts
while we swallow whole
worms spilling up
from childhood and trace
the iridescent trails of slugs
by light of a quarter moon.
And he (politely) tells us:
I do not understand.

There is something in this nothingness
that bulges from the socket of a long-ago blinding,
that beats with an inverse heart.
Can everybody hear it?

Or is it just I
who once at an AA meeting
sat shotgun in a metal chair,
balancing a tin-foil tray on my knee
for the ashes of my story.
An old man leaned close
slipping words and cigarette smoke
into my ear: Beware the anger of a dove.

I went to refill coffee, slumped
into another chair, another row,
and gnawed the side of my thumb
until it bled. Why did my flesh plume
so suddenly red? He must have been
a loon, no doubt, who maybe planned
to gull me into bed, an old man’s
absolution, but why the burning of my face?
It must have been the graze of his beard
or the kind of shame
I never understand.

-Kitty Yanson

Sarah laughs
and then dissembles.
No, I didn’t laugh, she says.
Sir, the night drapes
hot and limp upon the curve
of cricket song. It is that
you hear.

But he replies, oh no,
I’m not mistaken.
Laugh you do at My control
and nature, prone to bushes
kindled by obedience
and the whirlwinds that
spell My name
in the dust.

Sarah argues with the Lord
as she does with everyone:
me or her sister or the newest
Abram in her life whose daily
fare of hot dogs and sitcom reruns
wrinkles her overeducated nose,
but whose love for her is sure and filling,
a good meal, an after-dinner nap.

Her finger drives around her wrist
her silver bangle given by her mother
whom she hated. A beast persistent
at the millstone, this solitary finger
worries the unchangeable. Fifty
is an awkward age for
renovating epics; the cast of thousands
flake in their rounded tins, slivered moments,
transparencies slicing the skin:
the touch of the spindle: Sleep,
beauty. Sleep.

But Sarah laughs:
Can song, like fire, spring
from old bones tindering to each other
in the night? Can it be
there is no hiding,
that God’s power knows no bounds?
Or does she find Him out,
guessing that her Abram’s leap
to Abraham is nothing more
than Ha! a single syllable of surprise?
And does she know
that time is the child of whirlwinds
writing and rewriting the name
of the restless God
in her infertile ground.
And she will
call this utterly impossible blooming
They laughed.

-Kitty Yanson