Angela Consolo Mankiewicz: I have four chapbooks out, the most recent are An Eye,  published by Pecan Grove Press (2006) and As If, just released from Little Red Books-Lummox. I have a Grand Prize sestina coming in Trellis,  a 1st-prize broadside from Amelia, a Pushcart nomination from Hammers, and a Writers Digest Honorable Mention for my play, Judgments.

Publications include: PRESA, Montserrat, Re)Verb, Seldom Nocturne, Arsenic Lobster, Temple/Tsunami, Butcher Block, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Hawaii Review, Cerberus, Karamu, Lynx Eye, Pemmican, Blind Man's Rainbow, ArtWord, Lummox Journal.

My childrens' stories, The Grummel Book, are being reissued on CD this year by SHOOFLY.

I've also been the Contributing Editor and Regional Editor, respectively, for the small (now defunct) journals Mushroom Dreams and New Press.

Combining poetry and my love of music, I am collaborating with a composer on an opera and song cycle.   www.POETACMANK.blogspot.com
 

Fidelity

 

I hold on
to my sufferings,

recall them one
by one,

not savor but recall,

recollect, re-collect
and once re-collected,

re-store them
to their various

proper places
until time comes

to remember again.

*

One must make note to remember;
if not, you may forget the last category

a grief or grievance sorted into; ranking
may be lost and have to be re-ordered.

I fear a timid forgetfulness;
I fear my sufferings would feel betrayed

if I could not recall them, properly;
I would be naked, then, and ashamed.

 

 

Reunited At Last

 

They walk
like de-stringed
marionettes: slow,
stiff, directionless

They touch
each other

laugh, talk

They look at
each other

into each
other's eyes

They talk
about a past
I was part of

and someone thinks
he may recall who
I may have been

Oh, I remember you—
Didn't you—

but someone else
interrupts
to tell a funny story.

I laugh too and
try to explain where
I was, why I wasn't there
in their common futures

and that it wasn't my fault

 

 

Unrhymed Tercets

"Friend"

 

With his hands held out, like Frankenstein's Monster,
a boy appeals to an infant girl;
he is 12,

straddling the border of adolescence, throbbing
from a vacant childhood, peopled by myths
he cannot touch.

This, he can touch. This, curls flesh around his fingers,
ending his loneliness: a friend for all the days
of his life.

They will play together, eat together, talk. His father
will smile, now, and his mother will stop
telling stories

he can't make sense of: murder on a patriarch's land,
favors denied, a bishop, the soprano, feud, fraud,
cheated, always

cheated. No need for stories, anymore. He can touch,
now, he can believe, like his mother taught him to,
in blood.

He waits, scanning for signs. But Father doesn't smile,
and the little girl laughs only
for him.

Mother rages at her mirror, snatches the girl, sits her
on a long, thorn-guarded branch, twisting her
long, dark hair,

dark as Rapunzel's was fair, into braids strong
as a seaman's rope; rope only Mother
can climb.

There the girl spins Mother's dreams, nodding at
stories she can't make sense of, forgetting how
to laugh.

When the girl grew up, she snipped off her braids and jumped.
She found the boy tending to new loves. But he
remembered

and tried to embrace her. She looked at him with
loathing, hissed and bolted like "The Bride,"
while Igor grinned.

 

 

Unrhymed Couplets

Concerning My Weakness for Slavs

 

I opened the door to a hard, cold room
a familiar door, a familiar room

Its floors were bare, its walls were white
but dulled to grey what might be white

in sunlight through a window, even closed
and steamy from a radiator, even closed

The bedroom was carpeted and over-warm
welcomed by uneasy feet, not yet warm

enough to shed the shadows of melancholy
but will be soon, must be soon, enough

to shed some strains of melancholy only Slavs
understand, so they insist, only Slavs

Again, they insist: only a Pole can play Chopin
Then Rubenstein, you must say, is a Pole

He was a Jew, they say, but a special case
Was he a Pole or not? I insist

Yes, they insist, in this case
But I know better about only Slavs

and in this case and hard, cold rooms,
familiar rooms, and longings, over-warm,

cooled by a minute's snow flurry, barely
decipherable as snow flurry in a place

that is mine, that will recognize me, I
insist, if I must return for solace,

should you, my glorious Slav, leave without me;
it would be here, under unlightable snow flurries,

I will seek solace from grievous sorrow
and enduring melancholy, I insist.

 

 

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