National Poetry Month continues on strong with long time FC contributor Salvatore Difalco. Difalco has proven himself in the past to be a master of imagery, and he delivers once again with these touching poems. Take a look, you won’t be disappointed!
Bleeding From The Ears
I feel like the moon is attacking me tonight
under the crosshatched shade of palm trees,
my amnesia an impenetrable white wall.
If I see stars they do not shine above,
they shine inside my head, among its clouds.
I wear a rumpled sheet, my clothes
and shoes nowhere to be found.
The palm trees sigh like sleepy aunts,
but do not speak of the laguna and the black
surrounding hills. Shapes advance
and withdraw in the charcoal darkness,
accompanied by flashes of eyes.
Nothing comes to me, nothing, no
name, home, friends, family, who is
my mother? I look at the moon.
It moves closer and closer, I hear it
growling, grinding. Was it always this way?
Was it always on to me? I fear
we’ve done this bit before, me
and the freaking moon—me with no
mind, the moon with a mind bent
on making me howl at it.
Possible Lives
Suppose your life
went another way.
You turned right instead of left.
You kept to yourself,
only spoke when necessary.
You suffered from
few migraines and bouts
of insomnia. You
practiced meditation.
Your children grew up
to be doctors. Your wife
respected you and never
stopped loving you
and you never strayed.
Your dogs never died,
your mother lived to one hundred,
your cousin Marge recovered
from her heart attack.
You spent much time together
at her cottage recalling
the shared happy days
of your youth. Uncle Frank
and Aunt Celestina went
strong into their nineties.
Your sister married and
had five kids. The optimism
of the twentieth century
persisted in the twenty-first
as we moved step by
step toward a more
harmonious, fulfilling
and egalitarian future.
But the migraines persisted
and children never entered
the picture. Marge died
as did the mom and
Uncle Frank and Aunt
Celestina, and my sister
never married and lost
heart in the end. We still
connect now and then
but live far apart, she
in her head and me
in that promising past.
Eiffel Tower Made of Matchsticks
You stand on the other side of the glass.
Nothing is solid, all abstracted in your eyes—
everything appears as you imagine it.
Darkness dissolves the glass.
You, too, are consumed, atom by atom,
as the nuit sauvage feasts.
Suspended in the barbed wire fence
of your imagination, you find someone
who resembles your old mother, the one
you had all but reduced to ashes.
When was the last time you sat
in the parlor and venerated the urn?
Mother burned well, perhaps,
as well as she had lived, high on
herself and walking a tightrope
of unrealizable hopes and dreams.
But your dream rises above brute will,
delicate and mad and utterly combustible.
Did this capriccio come to you in your sleep?
You dreamed of the hours and days turning
into weeks, months, and finally years . . .
Perhaps it represents your leap against
the earth, against your limited existence
on it, for everything it is has kept you down.
This thing will stand on earth as a monument
to your momentary conquest of chaos,
but in time the elements will topple it
or a random red-cheeked child
with a pyromanic gaze will strike
an allumette de phospore and set it ablaze.
Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada. His short fiction has recently appeared in Cafe Irreal, Gone Lawn, and Brilliant Flash Fiction.
