Simeon Berry
two poems
Tile
Dad brings me to his
nocturnal meeting in the church basement Mom’s hysterical Paranoid over her jellos laid out with weird things Vesicles Vacuoles Mitochondria The spaces in cells Miss Raylene says are only smaller reflections of the larger ones in ourselves and dwarf stars Mom thinks God’s mad about the graveyard on the moon being vandalized Dad knows we should get out of the house Though I don’t like you to see me being this honest It’s shameful Not right for a three-quarter person like me He brushes the safety-pinned sleeve like an epaulet The circled chairs are full The males murmuring almost nothing All dashes and commas Neighbors with termites Stigmata on their tractors Dad turns out of shadow Grimaces at his un-arm I hope some seraphim’s beating down a devil with it Better than I ever was with it in life Good for nothing but grasping spirits and being awkward around others He puts his good hand in his back pocket and I think of Mom wringing out proofs and numbers from the Bible like dishwater from a rag the way You’d strip a mudbug For parts For its armor |
Prep
Mom’s cooking sounds like cosmic noise I bury my face in the nape of her neck from behind as she minces onion Mom Jay won’t be coming around anymore She pushes the flat of the blade across the board like a needle on a record Is that bad Dear I jump up on the clean spot of the counter I don’t know She blows the hair out of her face Well Look at what Ruth said to Naomi Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee for whither thou goest I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God I watch her concentrate on the knife What was her deal She incises a white polyp of garlic Some say Ruth was acting out of grief Not wanting to be alone and widowed Some say otherwise I look out the window at the objectless horizon The dessicated corn stalks The half-empty silos pinging like radar in the snow What do you say She sighs You know this Book has answers Even its refusals have answers Shall the lightning not call to the whale And the gulfs whelm the emerald that has brought thee to me Even across aeons of strange stars and the cattle dead in the fields She takes my hand My prints sticking to hers like in those crime shows My gift to you from this is Ruth’s silence |
Simeon Berry lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. His first book, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), won the 2013 National Poetry Series, and his second book, Monograph (University of Georgia Press), won the 2014 National Poetry Series.