Facial Recognition

 

.          kept from mourning tata
.                    (well-meaning grown-ups finding grief too raw)
i opened in my mind a journey to his everlasting life

.          small face expanding
.          under such overwrite
.                    that no outward mark betrayed the wound beneath the skin

.          mother’s death memorialized
you see
.          this crease above my eyebrow that dammed uncivil flood

.                    so   the child    the dog         the spouse
.          not be awash in that torrential
.                    tree-toppling flood

.          deep channels running alongside mouth
for all the times laughter burst out like huddled bird
.                    sprung skyward

and these   grooves like rake marks above
.          beneath my lips
ah                I have kissed and kiss and (sand not running out) will kiss

***

Putting on Weight

.          until i lived here
i lived in innocence

.          no fear of ticks
kept me from the long grasses

.          no dark suspicions
made water solid beneath my palm or sole

.          coupled new leaves
were glued together by love    not greenworms

.          each road edge
was unlined      like a young face      without the triad poison

.          perhaps we      despite our settling
long subcutaneously for bliss of relocation

.          perhaps the weight of so much known
will fly as elemental particles in that last firing

***

Anca Vlasopolos published the award-winning novel The New Bedford Samurai; the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement; four collections of poems, Often Fanged Light (forthcoming, Adelaide Books, 2019), Cartographies of Scale (and Wing) (2015); Walking Toward Solstice (2012); and Penguins in a Warming World (2007); three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel, Missing Members, and nearly three hundred poems and short stories in literary journals.