Stephanie Laterza
The Tears of Magdalene
He was someone’s son once
with smooth-nailed cherub’s feet,
toes descending like the pipes on a rondador, mourning
whistles in the subway in Times Square, lying
corded now in white tubes for breath
and webbed with food, blood, meds,
and one more tube to let the waste
out of his white feathered head,
snoring, with a lolling tongue
when the mouth is nothing
but a portal to breathe in and spew out
words ragged with tears to her on the phone.
If he had been hers, and mine, he would have lived as long as Abraham,
like my father, silent and treacherous deaf with rage only age put out,
always waiting for her to come back because that is her punishment
for making him our father
instead of all the worthier
suitors who sought her hand and promised her
cold harbor wharves and blue blood cords and immortal
photos on the mantle from Gibraltar, Mauritius, Everest,
but he belonged to himself,
stitched with red and orange flames
to remember Mama, we don’t know when
the rain will break its cloud sac
and cut the strings that bound them
for a time
the only certainty is my father,
waiting and watching like God,
silent and treacherous deaf.
Eros
The way pigeons fly in an upward vee
in the free pale dawn, I unbutton even my skin,
to become more naked,
sweat-glazed like the head
on a lily’s pistil,
I breathe inside the hollow of your insides;
you breathe back-
I fold myself like a flattened rose
between your palms
because now
words don’t need to come as often
because you have
found me as I have become, without history
it seems you have always been
feeding me water from your mouth,
I have learned the ocean
is a familiar blue
mirror held up to the sky,
holding the whole horizon.
Stephanie Laterza is the author of the legal thriller, The Boulevard Trial. Her short fiction has appeared in The Nottingham Review, Writing Raw, Literary Mama and Akashic Books. Her poetry has been published in Newtown Literary, San Francisco Peace and Hope, Literary Mama and Meniscus Magazine. She holds a B.A. in English from Fordham College at Lincoln Center and a J.D. from New England Law School. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 