PSH: Poets of the Week

Bio (auto)

Rosemarie Crisafi lives in Fishkill, New York. She works in for a non-for-profit agency that serves individuals with disabilities. Her poetry has been published most recently in Snow Monkey, Ghoti, The Potomac, Red River Review, Unlikely Stories, Eclectica Magazine, and The Adroitly Place Word.

Sunday in the Group Home

She hovers in a tiara of braids,
rows of diamonds and starbursts.

Brown arms do so much, flashing a stream
of printed blocks, spirals and eyelashes.

Ancestral cheeks and broad forehead,
polished brass and copper, tribute her mothers.

How unwearied she moves in the colors
and secret power of her Ashanti wings.

Emerging from the haze without words,
he blinks, safe in the goodbyes,

twisting and linking the sunrays and crescents
of adinkra cloth.

Piscialletto

Weeds grow in gutters. With ice pellet shingles
a fire engine aria duets. I abandon the aquarium
castle. I drain the places

where my mother strained linguine ribbons
where Daddy paid a penny for each dandelion,

piscialletto (to wet the bed), he called them,
popped from soil. I unearth the taproot whole.
Across clouded glass, filaments

light the wind. With the patina of a photograph
reflected in a mirror, I turn the key.

Binary Goodbye

When I press Send:

Sequoias blink into view,
fog dripping off foliage,
falling
a long distance to the ground;

unfelt on the forest floor
wind crackles in the awning
where orioles live;

in the underworld, giant shadows
loom,
dark soldiers
on gold-threaded moss.

I send it all to you
in an equation.

The Office Pineapple

Hiking up four flights,
elevator paralyzed, copy machine
in a trance, lungs quivering,
you come face to face with her son’s drawing.

In the cubicle of the girl from Jamaica, a Rastafarian
it seems,
a pineapple,
pinned to a bulletin board,
a beach of pinwheel palms,

a multicolored grenade, tossed
into the air, bursts...
Sword-shaped leaves open in the detonation.
You decide you can work

with this psychedelic fruit.

Bio (auto)

Alex has been a janitor, a counselor, a waiter, a bartender, a housekeeper, a salesman, a cook, a criminal, a has-been and a never-was. He is currently hiding in Minneapolis.

The following work is Copyright © 2007, and owned by Alex Stolis and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Divorce isn’t as bad as people make it out to be

Say, for the sake of argument, you had never been in love
before., never saw that woman, the one with amazing tits,

voice like light rain--never noticed the way she walked
into a room, lit it up like a firecracker.

Say for the sake of argument you never asked her friend
if she was seeing someone, never asked for her number

only watched from a distance and fantasized about her
hair, her perfume, the lace about her bra.

Say, for the sake of argument, you never learned to say
consumed, compelling, outré --never learned to whisper

and nod, give a knowing look from across the room
to signal the perfect moment to leave.

Say, for the sake of argument, you never learned to catch
random bits of conversation, never learned to count the beats

between her breath. You might have become a liar instead,
incomplete and unknowing--a foreign man in a familiar land.