Julia Lisella

Boston Common

Boston Common was just the way I want to feel
weed smoke wafting its gentle skunk scent.
We spied some shade away from the homeless guys
and risked that the cool air was temporary, just a passing cloud.
I pressed the small of my back to the dirty bench as we talked
mother and son, though we could be friends today as I forgot myself
and just said the next things, and those next things friends talk about.
The park was full of noisy men
really laughing
like in a good country
but not really; I don’t know now what country
can grow here or why the heart
gets trained to shrink. Their hearts are so small you said
about the angry customers who come to your restaurant.
I didn’t want to leave you and yet couldn’t believe
it was really not so hard. Walk me to the station steps I said
and you walked me there, my hug shaking your whole body
from right to left like my love could take you
just about anywhere.

Half-sonnets for Barbara after Her Funeral Mass

Her daughter said she’d started smoking again–
Marlboros. Each morning she’d sit on the back porch.
The birds’ cacophony pleased her.
She’d read her devotions, she read one that morning.
Believe in the stillness, believe in trees,
believe in the noise of birds, they don’t care.
Inhale. Hold in the smoke in the depth of your throat.

I, too, could sit all day in silence
thinking of nothing but trees:
the banyan its own artist
the linden supple and shaking
the mangroves dipping in and out of the watery earth.
All day. The trees wouldn’t need to know
anything about me, what I’m thinking.

I learned that certain weeds, even if pulled out at the root,
must sit in the sunlight to really die,
must not be mixed up with the others until then.
I’ve been careless on this count, have thrown them all out together.
Believe in the stillness of the air, the sun’s deep burn that kills.
I don’t want any more women to die
of men’s hate and their smallness.

Jealousy

I wake to the uneven rhythms of his strange breathing, air sucked into the hollows of his pillow. I can’t sleep. I can’t wait for sleep. I rise and watch him as I close the door behind me, jealous of the depth of his sleep.

I do not love my jealousy. But I love the morning alone. How slowly I move through it, the quiet. How I long for these minutes to last. That longing. That coveting of what one has that one knows won’t last, that little terror I feel creeping in, interrupting the calm of listening and watching all the morning vibrations around me—the garbage truck, the jays flashing across the yard, the tremble of the old maple and its shadow, its patterns.
Oh, to be inside my own time without dread of losing it. To be near but not the same. To admire but not to want.

proud

you are grown, you two
alive in your small lairs
miles and days from me
your voices my only link,
my milkshake and grilled cheese
my paper doll cut out
my Playmobil neighborhood
my wicked dress up
my weekend daze of a dozen
8-year-olds awake since 4
my soccer afternoons
in the wet grass
my chill in the freezer tank
of an ice-skating rink
watching you both fall and glide
fall and glide
my afternoon kitchen talk
my glow-in-the dark playdough
my fluorescent green fondant
my too many Christmas cookies
my spoiled sour dough starter
dripping from the top of the fridge
my bottom-of-the-bag tobacco threads
my vodka nips under the beds
my late-night hang ups
my marijuana-infused hallway
my voice an anchor
my heart a pot of soil
my legs a bridge
my arms a fortress
my voice a hymn in the dark

In Spirit Years

In spirit years perhaps my mother is younger than 103
and I can still catch up to her if I hold her hand long enough
so we can think about the same things at the same time
to be the same age at the same time
or, I saw her across the table from me long ago,
mom, you’re going to be 103 someday, and she would have said, no,

     impossible,
and you will always be my little girl
and she’d finish stirring the oatmeal,
or driving a pin across the edge of the dress she was hemming