Monday, July 9, 2018

The Fall--a compilation of Two-Line Poems


The Fall

A stage, a fall, a distant warning
echoed by a backyard dog’s howl
refrains from a two-year-old in red tights
looking like veins in the tops of her black patent leather shoes
molten, seamed, flaring

She still can’t know why
Santa changed his clothes in the women’s bathroom
crushed red velvet and cotton balls draping
over a stall like the center of a cherry cream
oozing into a box

More than the broken lip and bumped forehead
she remembers a mother sewing a pink Easter cape
for a child who loved dirt so much
she found it in the middle
of a white cotton sheet

She broke another tooth falling
off a church wall, concrete turning
white sharp and flat as if she were playing
all three movements of Clemente’s Sonatina
to come back to middle C

Rome falls in the book of Revelation
horsemen of the apocalypse like that spring
in Bradford Woods when a Sunday school teacher
thought teens needed to learn about hell
instead of Clint Eastwood painting a town red

She forgot about that first day
in the Presbyterian Church basement
when strangers oohed and awed
over an itchy cast from the boys in Florida
a pancake toss to the ground

This is what you say
when a pastor prays for you
while you bow over a sprawl of skirt
clutching frozen meat in a throbbing hand
on an uneven kitchen floor.


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