Angela Consolo Mankiewicz, US

 

 

Free Verse 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.