Lisa Sisler is the editor of Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other, a poetry anthology from Birch Bench Press,
an imprint of Write Bloody Books, and the assistant editor of OVS magazine. She received her MA in English from Rutgers University and her MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as RadiusLit and Contemporary American Voices. She teaches Writing and Literature at Kean University and at various other colleges in New Jersey where she resides with her boyfriend and their cat army.
---------
As the Crows Fly
I waited while he washed the day’s dirt
off his hands with gritty Lava soap.
Sometimes, outside the bathroom door
for what felt like eternity, I’d sit: listen
to the rush of water in the basin,
the scuffle of his boots against the tile.
Every day, I’d wait for him to emerge
refreshed, different.
Every day, I wanted to tell him small things:
how that day in science class, Mrs. Palace
let us light our own Bunsen burners,
and after, my hands smelled like his,
musty, important.
Or, that instead of recess, I sat in the aisle
of the school library reading
a story called “The Monkey’s Paw”
and, for a few minutes, I forgot and thought
I was in an English cottage, watching the old man,
shriveled paw in hand, move toward his front door,
its hinges shaking.
Every day, I wanted to tell him the truth
about our own front door,
the panes of glass shattered
by my mother’s fist
the knob ripped from its socket,
no accident, not my clumsiness again.
But every afternoon, out of the bathroom
my father barricaded himself
behind the news, black and white and important,
while the crows
flew from the backyard.
Days of 1979
She learned to sew from a neighbor woman,
A German seamstress, when she was a child.
She’d practice on calico squares
Pushing the needle through,
Fingertips pierced by the point,
Clumsy stitches the seamstress would observe
Then remove and make the girl redo.
When the woman thought the girl was ready
She cut a pattern to be fashioned into a doll,
Stuffed just before the final stitching.
Hunched over her work, reticent, the girl darned,
The smell of sour bröten seeping into fabric,
Careful to pull each loop taut to the cotton—
No space for the airy batting to poke through.
The doll perfectly sewn, perfectly stuffed,
And the seamstress delighted, but the girl hated that doll:
Blonde hair, blue dress, flat smile sewn shut.
Just once she wanted something to burst open—
Its guts loud, dark, wild, true.
The Blueprint
My mother believes God lays out the plan for your life at birth
the blueprint, she calls it.
On hers there is a nun smashing her head into a blackboard
for not understanding long division.
When my mother returns home that day
expectant of her mother’s pity and anger
At the welt on her forehead, already a Lenten purple,
She is informed that He works in mysterious ways.
Agnes on Average Tuesday
Crime scene tape, caught in morning wind, unsteady in a rookie cop’s grip
Bead of sweat that drips nape to tail during the walk past yellow concrete
The brakeman’s gritted tooth, vomit-stained shirt
Sinew sliced, bone bared to the weight of the engine’s windshield
An orange-shirted man mumbling to God, making the sign of the cross
Smeared tissue and garbage stuck under wooden slats, metal tracks
Flesh, gut, fragment wedged into nooks and gravel missed by the hose
The coo of pigeons greedy in pursuit of a mid-morning feast
Mi Madre Dios, and kids double dog daring to peer over the edge: that is so gross, and
we just stood there, we just stood there, and we wish she’d kept her dying private.