Feast

Today I got a little closer to the memory of my grandmother’s perogies. 
A filled dumpling. Slavic for feast. Today I got a little farther
from my blurry, unburied rage.

I was facing north, trying to figure out which way the wind was blowing. 
Someone was paddling in a silver kayak. Another being pulled 
by a motorboat. Neither were saying.

My aloneness was a luscious intoxicant. My anonymity a sequin, 
a single ripening thimbleberry, a yeasty sweetness. 
For weeks I’ve been learning French

in the dark. By moonlight. Jupiter at my right shoulder. 
Thinking about the way my son sees animals
before anyone else,

spots a dragonfly larva in a lake where all I see is reflection. 
A lizard, a garter snake. Two rainbow trout holding 
near the shore. Today I got a little closer

to knowing what I’m willing and not willing to live without. 
Today I’m sitting at my grandmother’s long and floured
table, perogies laid out end to end.

Big Bang

Sometimes I get tired of mottled versus marveled, mute versus meat,
crepe paper thighs as opposed to crepe paper streamers. 
I’m tired of thinking I should go back to dying my hair

at the salon, tired of danger like the lit cigar always on the tip
of my grandfather’s mouth. Is that the same cigar
or is that a new one, I’d ask (I hated

that he kept lighting fires in our house). I’m tired of the endless list 
of can’ts: maskless massage, sipping a friend’s drink,
shucking a friend’s corn.

Eventually, there will be sleep. Eventually, the distance will see me. To distance,
I will seem far off, a vulnerable orchard, a barely visible cloud. I can’t even
remember how I used to crazy my way through a crowd,

teaching my shoulders to shimmy, sharing with loved ones my high caliber sobs.
Instruction can be useful, but I’ve forgotten how to stand at a blackboard,
share my solutions. Here’s a bright and shiny Pedialyte popsicle:

I’ve stopped starting the argument that began in 1992, the one 
about which smells better, Seattle’s fresh mown grass
or a fall day in New Jersey, started listening to you

when you say stability is overrated. At night we cuddle up
so I can read to you from Cosmos, a little story about
something that wasn’t, then was.

MARTHA SILANO

Martha Silano has authored five poetry books, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). She is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Martha’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Image, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College and Hugo House in Seattle, Washington.