christine poreba
Flight
A butterfly flaps lightly
down the highway.
It’s how a prayer
slipping in the dark
might look when
thrown to spoken air.
It floats toward
our windshield,
and is gone.
On the scale of tragedy
this collision
is a fight in a dollhouse.
But the mark left
on the glass could
look a bit like
any human sorrow,
couldn’t it?
The way the stain spreads
crooked in a corner,
and vibrant colors slur
into a spot of white
that opens up
another memory,
another butterfly,
one we climbed
to a roof to release
from a box
into a sea of city,
one flying close
to the ground
that a four-year-old
with a purple sneaker
and double-knotted laces
stepped on with a purpose
no one understood,
with the force
of a hard current of sky.
Leftovers
I heard the waiters scolding us tonight
in Spanish to each other
at Coletto’s Restaurant
off Market Street in San Francisco
as they cleared away
our half-eaten cannolis,
mashed mix of whipped cream,
crooked chocolate letters
Happy Birthday Sherri
left carelessly to soak in porcelain.
I pictured this dessert in little portions
safely bagged inside my freezer—
how I would have loved to sneak away
with the pieces of that night,
the way my mother and I used to at
those receptions we would go to.
Together, we’d delicately push those olive-dotted
sandwiches, Carr’s crackers packed
with thick slabs of herb speckled cheeses,
little bunches of grapes and curvy
Italian cookies into paper napkins
and then into her purse and my pockets,
as we circled through elegant ladies
who nibbled on edges of rye and left
them to lie on table tops.
I used to watch the chocolate melting lines
inside the wafers while we waited for the subway
and revealed our sweaty packages—
I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so satisfied,
my mother and I smiling at the 86th Street subway stop,
sharing what we’d saved, sweeter in secret.
What is happening to me? I think
as I sit silently inside Coletto’s, hands
in my lap with leftovers being taken away;
just last week I’d been with a date
who had our paella packed in styrofoam for me
and called the next day, disappointed, to say
he’d found it spoiled on the floor of his car,
yellow rice dried out and useless, grains
I had tasted and loved and left behind.
