~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Katherine Sánchez Espano

 Good Eye, Bad Eye

At precisely six, he walked the gauntlet
of suburbia in spring, birds hurled like stones

above his straw fedora. His good eye
was bright as a Ferris wheel turning backwards,

and he saw his past young lovers, the secret diary
of inner thighs, mugs of instant coffee

that tasted like Cuban fields in summer
because nostalgia never does things by halves.

His bad eye was a microscope
out of focus, and he saw only defiant weeds,

sprinklers that birthed sidewalk puddles—
the rhythm method gone wrong—

and his own arthritic mailbox,
bills like strata of a dried lake bed.

We are always at war with time, he said
to the clock of sky. The osprey was a loose cog,

falling with purpose, and when it stole
youth, a duckling in its beak,

the man chased the osprey down the street.
The bird’s wings stretched for years.

Little Flames

She believes in the wrath of wildfires,
the simplicity of a house in ashes.

The turn of a key in a lock
is harder to understand,

the click like a calculator showing
inscrutable sums. Even his coffee grinds

are the color of redacted words.
His face is a tundra, his torso a desert,

and when she orbits his Terra Fertilitatis,
her mouth searches for a crater

to land, never to stay. Her breath
is a struck match,

and he can wave his hand
through her heat, never burned.

Sleepwalker

Morning parcel—a cicada
shell on her window sill,
the skin like blown glass,
a thought in its head

that might have been her own,
a forgotten dream of newborn moss
on the cradle of Mayan ruins.
When her feet anchor to her patio,

she is an archaeologist, finding
a lost city of cicadas on the lawn.
History clings to the swing set
not swinging, the dead-end road

of an oak tree’s branch.
Such bittersweet mystery
in what’s not there, the space
within the perfect sculpture

of a stranger.
She is afraid she will remember
the cicada’s life
and shed her own.

Starlight’s stipple—her childhood
street. She sleepwalks,
and a neighbor watches her
dance among the empty cars.