In the bowl, cobalt-blue, you
collect each spilled pebble,
imposing order against his going.
On the table, stacked just so—
Mandelstam, Hopkins, Plath,
antlers and a heron’s hollow bone.
Through the door he did not close,
in September wind, switch-grass shivers
like the tich-tich of a reed-thatched roof.
Its seed-head plumes nod and shake—
first believing, then refusing to believe.
You stroke ridges of the empty
tortoise shell, patchwork gray,
the vase, its stiff, ceramic flounces,
a flamenco dancer’s traje de gitana,
and press your thumb against the jade
plant’s spikes until blood replaces numb.
From the book-cover, Frida glares at you—
her single brow, her eyes sparsely lashed,
anguished but defiant, her frown,
mustached, pursed and pouted.
She has divorced Rivera, El Gordo,
and from her web of thorny necklace dangles,
dead, a hummingbird. On her back,
a cat, a spider monkey, both coal-
black. You dreamed him last night
into that tom you fed for years
that wandered, slunk home, starving.
Circling your ankles, black back arched,
round your calves, he curled his tendril-tail,
twisted himself between your legs,
bunted his sorry head against your hand,
then marked you with his musky scent.
Cold blue eyes and flattened ears
like Kahlo’s cat, beneath the yellow porch-light
he pleaded, yowling for your scraps.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Laura Isabela Amsel has poems in recent issues of Crosswinds, Briar Cliff Review, Dunes Review, Nimrod, and Atlanta Review. Her poem “Father” won the 2022 Monica Taylor Poetry Prize, and A.E. Stallings selected her poem “Cain” for the 2022 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize. Her first book, A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, won the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Prize.
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