MOMA
by Donna Pucciani
The Museum of Modern Art
New York
Egg shells and styrofoam,
a guitar, half a pear,
staircase, moon, marble,
a clock rising behind a viaduct,
sharp edges or the blended blood
of a dream gone bad.
Piano and metronome,
fish and cat, water in a jug,
lemons and leaves, reclining nudes,
violins, numerals, a saxophone tree,
strange birds, guns and circles.
A pipe not a pipe, a boating party,
a village in Norway, a woman
covering her ears against the wind.
The night is dark, the windows lit.
The rocks are for suffering,
a sky of spinning suns. See
the gypsy with a vase
and a lute, a stick in one hand,
a lion sniffing a sleeping corpse,
no footprints in the sand.
Ah, to be in Avignon
like the demoiselles with their grapes
and bold prisms of breasts,
pink thighs, eyes scarred
with lost innocence, the deep furrows
of a thousand wounded days.
No cures here
for flu or loneliness.
And yet, the flowered wallpaper
whispers of a fishbowl. Be looking
always, all ways. Your crystal gaze
follows the golden fish
darting through little space,
making the minutes die off
like so many bubbles.
_____________________________________________________
Donna Pucciani is a Chicago-based poet. Her work has been
translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, and Italian. She has
won awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the National
Federation of State Poetry Societies, and other organizations.
Pucciani’s sixth and most recent book of poetry is A Light
Dusting of Breath.
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Apple Valley Review:
A Journal of Contemporary
Literature
ISSN 1931-3888
Volume 11, Number 2
(Fall 2016)
Copyright © 2016
by Leah Browning, Editor.
All future rights to material
published in the Apple
Valley Review are retained
by the individual authors
and artists.
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