Suffolk Street, December 1989 by Nancy Bevilaqua

 

Jana Al Mubaslat

Suffolk Street, December 1989

 

Toward the old barely 

furnished room: I’d rather hide my horses there

beside the radiator frozen in the window glass

inside uncertain prospect of that Christmas.

How I held you. What awakened me. You

as catalyst, incipient.

Your death

no different from the other deaths that year.

I was young then, knew the streets,

each one a strand of river in me and direction.

Manhattan folded over as a wave inside my skins.

Now my knees are giving out: not kneeling

but receiving.

My insolence in knowing what’s not known,

what’s music sense: the words

are unimportant.

The skin itself will not remember anything.

© Nancy Bevilaqua

Enjoy other posts by Nancy Bevilaqua HERE!

Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua is a poet who has also worked as a caseworker for people with AIDS and as a travel writer. Her poems have been published in West Branch, Whiskey Island, Juked, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, and other publications. She now lives in Hoboken, NJ, where she is finally realizing her 50-year-old dream of learning to play drums.

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(Qaddish) by Nancy Bevilaqua

Mikhail Nilov 

 (Qaddish)

    (From the poetry collection Gelyana)

Honestly it’s not the cold

 

the uncertainty of trying    of the mist

around your face.

 

It’s handy to believe that you would save me.

 

I’ve never had much pain to speak of (yours

excruciating

every time)

 

bore the medications and the fevers

well enough    came through    sobered up.

 

What is wrong with me that I should have

so little fear?

The avenue back there: I made my buys

 

decisions for the future is a void     a crack

in waiting (how the light gets in).

I’ve binged on you    exceeded

 

what we gave out to the dying lining up St. Peter’s

or St. Paul’s on Thursday nights in 1989

to all the bankrupt soldiers in the thick of things:

 

Manhattan was a cavity    a drainage in the flow

of what they had expected from it free

to move out if they only had the wherewithal

 

the kind of guidance that one needs to flee.

 

Down here this year the leaves all singed by wind

because the storm was that severe this time

and early.

A cancer now in marks along my mother’s arms:

she’s being drained as well

 

she almost knows it and I’m again a blade in ice too sharp

to just fall through and having watched the prisms

they remind me that I must have taken something different 

than the others did and then I saw 

and then the landscape flattened out so I could see you

waiting and I’ve

no death wish but will be ready any time you’ll have me.

© Nancy Bevilaqua

Enjoy other posts by Nancy Bevilaqua HERE!

Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua is a poet who has also worked as a caseworker for people with AIDS and as a travel writer. Her poems have been published in West Branch, Whiskey Island, Juked, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, and other publications. She now lives in Hoboken, NJ, where she is finally realizing her 50-year-old dream of learning to play drums.

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Morning Glory By Nancy Bevilaqua

Pok Rie

Morning Glory

 

…a flower, he was saying,

and it would not stop

growing, all over the wall, growing

spontaneously.

 

Stone seats, and the God who answers only

in a certain tongue, caustic, hard frost,

singular.  There are other ways to reach me:

 

observe light’s ecstatic tricks

upon the landscape, note how stars

remove their shoes for you, that you know

what birds’ eyes mean, that you have already

recipes for music.  Know yourself as migrant,

transient, bearer of strange songs.

Sleep undisturbed, iridescent fish, in space

of what’s not known.  Swim in the God

that is here, now, this.

~From the poetry collection Gospel of the Throwaway Daughter

© Nancy Bevilaqua

Enjoy other posts by Nancy Bevilaqua HERE!

Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua is a poet who has also worked as a caseworker for people with AIDS and as a travel writer. Her poems have been published in West Branch, Whiskey Island, Juked, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, and other publications. She now lives in Hoboken, NJ, where she is finally realizing her 50-year-old dream of learning to play drums.

Follow Feed the Holy