By: Leon Fedolfi
Martha would read the newspaper more than once;
box scores, her favorite, and cartoons that made her laugh -
small stories with big fame - mothers lifting cars,
and the Obituaries of the not so named -
Martha liked that math.
The smell of Sunday mornings - vanished,
once travelled her hands and rested hair,
as she would return to her favorite lawn chair over and again,
gaze at the willow trees in her yard,
and wonder what roots beneath and holds her in place.
She would think of Mark, and caress a jawline of
bones punched and shaped to the hand that made them.
His love for her was formed in misshapen acts and words,
little mutes that look up to take faith.
Forgive me, he said. Over, and again.
In the end, he would take his own life before hers.
In her mind, she buried him in the junkyard where he worked.
Under still vehicles, tortured steel - leaves of small mirrors.
The names of cars were like Saints to him.
Martha was not marked in her religion.
A choice of breath over brethren.
She took her suffering as Sacrament -
someone to entwine with in the soil of being.
So, in a Fall of feats, when she had hit her head
against the rails of living, she chose to also
make her repose in the ground of working men.
For them both, a thousand Chevy engines poised
in silent prayer, run all over -
southern human, humid days.
Leon is an avid reader and aspiring writer of poetry. Most of his poetic writing was composed on a cell phone text application in a bar or teahouse in Brooklyn. He has published in Prometheus Dreaming, The Raw Art Review, Cathexis North West Press and Rumble Fish Quarterly.
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