Summertime

artwork: edward hopper

Summertime

by Mary Jo Balistreri

            after Edward Hopper

Let me linger a while longer

in the sun, this warm summer breeze.

On the threshold, before you brand me

with your label, I rest my arm on stone.

You call me easy. To say I could have chosen

differently is too easy.

Let me linger a while longer.

I like the way my straw hat protects,

its ribbon trailing down

my back. I’m beautiful in my white summer dress,

good patent leather shoes.

You too are capable of what you disown.

But let me linger while you stare.

You see a naked woman in a sheer white dress.

Big tits and fleshy thighs, the dress a cover up,

a come on.

But let me linger while you stare.

I am stony determination, black isolation.

The confines of my prison and my loneliness,

my bare subsistence—I offer what I can. 

  

Let me linger a while longer, my full red lips,

almost ready, my foot about to step down.

~ first published in Mobius: The Poetry Magazine

The Bookmobile

digital art from uncredited news photo

The Bookmobile

by Mary Jo Balistreri

Every two weeks, we’d search the horizon

for a distant cloud of dust. It never failed us.

Into the dry dirt lot the bookmobile rolled toward

a long line of small bodies baking in South Dakota heat.

Finally, finally when the door to the trailer opened,

the bookmobile lady in wire-rimmed glasses appeared,

her face a text of perception. Black hair swept high on her head,

she stood in her crisp white blouse.

One by one she handed us a towel to wipe sweaty hands

before allowing us to cross her threshold.

Inside, a fan blew cool air, and we felt it a holy place

so different from our homes.

I thumbed through pages of Scarlet O’Hara, but Nancy Drew proved

more exciting in her blue roadster as did the flying flanks

of The Black Stallion and Flame, manes streaming free.

But it was Francie who changed my life.

Like the tree of heaven that sprouted between cracked cement

outside her Brooklyn tenement,

she encouraged me to push ever upward, to rise from my own dirt lot,

and to grow, grow green and alive.

~ previously published on Your Daily Poem

In the Moon When Lakes Start to Freeze,

photo: ralph murre

In the Moon When Lakes Start to Freeze,

We Drive to Door County

by Mary Jo Balistreri

The golden bronze death of red oaks

            arches over the road

as we drive into tunnel

upon tunnel

of illumination        Country hymns

                                         Carry Me Down By The River

                                                                  Whispering Hope in my ear

open onto field upon field of cornstalks

            marsh grass       weathered red barns       stone silos

A flock of starlings block out the sun

Gulls assume the sky’s

 

                                    white

                                                space  

Vista after vista changes before us

            trees                russet and burgundy

sumac             color of dried blood

evergreens      so blue they are black

Snow’s slate gray sky wavers over morning

A few flakes drift

Green Bay waters     leap

                           fall back

Limestone bluffs stand still

As day darkens toward night

            those we have lost

appear along the roadside of our minds

            two small boys wave    

      parents                  grandparents

            friends from long ago

We carry them forward even as they vanish

            into the blur of distance

Carry them with us

            to another harvest

~ first published in Quill & Parchment

The Space Between Us

The Space Between Us

by Mary Jo Balistreri

In a land where stone takes one breath

every thousand years, I watch my father sleep.

Rivers of his body rise and fall,

skin map-thin at 93, arteries bottle-necked, narrowed.

Heat sears day, dims distant sand dunes to mirage.

His eyelids twitch, a leg muscle contracts.

He awakens with a start—perhaps currents

strange and powerful burrow

through his memory’s alchemy and pass

between us, this landscape that throbs

with ancient rhythms and ancestral pulses.

Half asleep, he shuffles to the door, brushes my arm

aside and steps into the sun. He whistles and waits.

A quail in elaborate topknot and desert fatigues

struts from under the orange tree.

The bird calls back but stops, sociable only at a distance.

Dad knows not to move. In a few minutes,

she takes her nine offspring

in the opposite direction, legs spinning

like pinwheels. He watches until they’re gone,

the way he used to watch me.

Later, he strolls among other affections—oleander,

bougainvillea.  His fingers brush the vine of flowers,

and I remember his gentle touch as he lingers

by blooms of deepest pink.

            We rode on the Aerial Bridge. He held me tight

            against his chest, patted my back, soothed my cries.

            It will be okay he said over and over as we rose

            higher and higher.

Memory jolts like an alarm as he leans toward
the cacti, the spiny seeds of bursage.
He lifts his head to the sun, my panic spiraling.

Like the fresh smell of creosote after a rain,

love’s brief moment stuns.

I take his hand as we walk toward the house,

inhale the fragrance of Here. Now.

Breath that takes me forward, breath

that will take him home.  

~ first published in Mobius

At a Jazz Bar in Denver . . .

photo: ralph murre

At a Jazz Bar in Denver with My Son

and His Friends, I Learn Something New

by Mary Jo Balistreri

I sit and listen in the midst

of my son’s crowd, speak

a bouncy banter.

We kill time

with the Simpsons before

David plays jazz.

In jeans and casual jackets,

we drink Coors,

check the wind-tossed sky,

the flash of lightning, hoping

in spite of the weather, a crowd

will pour through the door.

After a while, I hear a shift

of tone, a carefulness

I hadn’t noticed before.

In a conversation of augmented fifths

and ninths, the friends address me

in safe thirds. I listen more carefully.

Where is the cutting edge,

the forward motion? We converse

in C major, squarely metered.

I sit back stunned. The lack

of dissonance strikes a new chord.

When did Youth leave me and move on?

I adjust my position on the barstool,

lean into her absence, wonder

how I never saw her go.

                                   

~ first published in the San Pedro River Review

A Shift of Emphasis

photo: ralph murre

A Shift of Emphasis

by Mary Jo Balistreri

I

With dawn’s arrival, the desert landscape stretches,

its hot breath stifling as a closed attic. The cacti

in their wisdom have already licked the moisture

from the night. Wind whistles hot and hoarse,

while time hangs thirsty in the sky. A dark speck

hovers in the high washed air, watches and waits.

The desert, alive with light, sighs in silence.

II

The IV pole stands alone, arms lifted

as if in prayer, life-giving like the saguaro.

Light jumps and gutters, glints off hard metal

edges, brushes the sterile room in Arizona umber.

I sit here beside you, my mind lost among

the burnt sienna canyons, caught in the burrs

and brambles of fear, dizzy with the sheer drop

should I step too close to the edge.

Your strangled breath startles both of us.

You wake, washed blue eyes confused. I touch

your cheek, run my hand over your seamed

and tired face. You cross your hands over your heart.

III

The chrysalis jumps in the palm of my hand,

a tiny heart beating life in its brown shell.

Outside the window, a leaf lifts in the breeze.

Dreams lap behind your closed lids. I see your mouth

move, bend down close to hear you say,

How beautiful, your mother. Blue wonder smiles

across your face. You are a young man in love

and time stands still.

~ first published in Healing Muse

Seated Nude

georges braque: milwaukee art museum collection

Seated Nude
. . . . . .after Georges Braque, Seated Nude

by Mary Jo Balistreri

She bathes in the sun’s early glow,
that moment of splayed color
when magenta, yellow and violet spill
over the hills and brush her nude body
with pastel fingers.

In this first movement of spectral light,
she sits on the edge of an armless chair
and reaches a hand to her hair. Soon
she will turn, surprise her voyeur
and even herself. Easy in her skin, she bends
her back to the shadowed green shade,
sighs and relaxes her stomach. And yet,

her hair is not soft like the landscape, but bleeds
into the chair. Hard and bold, the fusion cuts
through the scene, does not try to belong.
She bends her arm at the elbow, angles
it like the back of the chair. She’s no longer
round and soft like the background.
She leans forward to added dimension,
swivels toward different views, desires
to be known by more than one perspective.

Although she allows this portrait of transition,
allows Braque to hold her one last time,
she demands her release, shifts her complexity
to greet the new century of angles, cubes and facets,
her curved past slowly fading behind her.

~ first published in the newsletter of the Milwaukee Art Museum