POETRY MODAY: JANUARY 4, 2010
Kathleen Fagley
To all our readers, a Happy, Healthy and (Reasonably) Prosperous New Year!
I’m pleased to introduce our featured poet for January, Kathleen Fagley. A 2005 graduate of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, she has had poems published in a number of print and online journals, such as The Comstock Review, Slipstream, Houston Literary Review and DMQ Review. Currently, she is also a poetry editor of Amoskeag: The Poetry Journal of Southern New Hampshire University.
Kathleen lives in Keene, NH, with her husband Paul and teaches at Keene State University.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Naples Beach
Here, we are happiest
in the warm Florida water.
My mother smiles at us
from the white sand that sings
strangely cool to touch.
My sister in her sparkly bathing suit
mine in a more sedate navy blue.
Our wobbly breasts
threaten to break out of the bone-rimmed cups
but we don’t care, we are care-free.
Skin bronzed to its Mediterranean origin—
as if swimming in the Adriatic, near Italy’s boot.
My sister smiles at me with a smile
I rarely see and we laugh
forgetting bad family genes
–a special child for each of us,
mother, sister and me.
I laugh at the nervous fish between my legs,
splash of water in my eyes and face.
Our buoyant selves float free,
we stare into cloudless sky.
I immerse my body up to my neck and survey
new landscape, the unbroken
line of horizon, how the sea and sky
become one color—a Virgin Mary blue,
and like the folds of her mantle, ample enough
to hide in. We wave to our mother
who waits on shore,
She is watching our every move.
Memorize this.
Fragile X
Was it cat-scratch fever, dirty box,
virus—doctor’s red scrawl
telling me to retake the test?
Was it the water, the artesian well run dry,
the raw hamburger, coats of polyurethane on floors
the stink of that?
Was it my Great-grandmother’s evil eye,
Uncle Dominic who died of fright, they said,
locked in the dark basement of Morris Street?
And the great-aunt who fell backwards
when she heard the news:
her young husband crushed between two trains.
Aunt Gertrude’s St.Vitus Dance,
the fragile x
chromosome or missing tip of the fourth.
Was it something I dreamed?
Mother’s voice when she found out,
the pain of that.
And still, the children knock on the door,
All Hollows Eve, the witches and bats,
their voices soft as they retreat.
Harvesting
An OR tech suited in blue
stands at my window,
holding a bag of ice.
He is harvesting organs from a donor
and needs a key to the morgue.
I guess who it is…who it was.
He died on 4:45, Friday afternoon,
twenty-five years younger than I am.
His skin will be rolled like sheets of parchment,
corneas punched out before
the sclera turns black.
There is a small window of time
to work in the garden of the body