ESTRANGED: LINES OF AN AMERICAN EXPAT

by Andrew Frisardi

Our smoldering has turned to smoke

That streaks the sky like contrails spread

Across the sea. Your fertile body

Gave me a life before I woke

To sleepwalk where my dreams had led,

Oblivious there’d been a rift.

Though distant, you still have your hooks

In me. Your plain talk has gone shoddy,

Your ruddy natural good looks

Are faded, yet your undertow

Still raises riptides in my blood.

Marking our continental drift

Apart, our fits of fire and flood

Are all goodbye and half hello.

My mother, my love, our past runs deep.

We don’t know what is going wrong,

To whom or where we now belong,

As we turn and toss and turn in sleep.

Andrew Frisardi is a Bostonian living in central Italy. His recent books include The Harvest and the Lamp (2020) and Ancient Salt: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and the Modern World (2022, forthcoming).

PARIS/BEIRUT

by Leslie Prosterman

A relative of Samer Huhu, who was killed in a twin bombing attack that rocked a busy shopping street in the area of Burj al-Barajneh, waves his portrait as she mourns during his funeral in the southern suburb of the capital Beirut on November 13, 2015. Lebanon mourned 44 people killed in south Beirut in a twin bombing claimed by the Islamic State group, the bloodiest such attack in years, the Red Cross also said at least 239 people were also wounded, several in critical condition. —JOSEPH EID/GETTY IMAGES via TheWorldPost, Nov. 16, 2015

all afternoon I defined massacre shambles abbatoir
then resorted to the binary
the   they did we did       the done to will do
the right the wrong    the dark the light    the lash the gun the bomb
contracted to one straight line:  
fear to rage to hate to kill to make a them that isn't me.

but by the night I was reminded
of the spaciousness
of the unclosed curve
of the infinite horizon

May we live with uncovered hearts
May that which binds our hearts be dissolved

into the widest possible compass of us


Author’s note: Thanks to John Travis for the lovingkindness meditation.


Leslie Prosterman, author of the book Snapshots and Dances (Garden District Press, 2011) and other poems in various journals and collections, recently collaborated with composer Charley Gerard to set her poem FluteBone Song to music, now out on CD (Songs of Love and Passion).  A former academic, she is also a sometime student of trapeze.