Pink Toenails
In the apartment with the
windows facing
the bright white church, cross and
solitary steeple, he wakes and makes a
bed that’s too small and yet too big
for the two of them, him and her,
in a city where she’s at home
and he’s not.
When she visits
he reads to her;
she cuts his
toenails,
paints them pink
reads chapters from his books,
calls him “Maestro” and
“An American Master.”
Not the first time
he has heard such comments.
Is she conning him? And is he
conning her when he says
“I love you” and
“You’re beautiful.”
He spaces out; it’s as
though she’s
not there in the
fugitive fog. Today she says
“I want distance.”
But isn’t that what he has
wanted all along?
Alone in the
ambiguous bed,
he
gazes out the window
at the white church, the cross and
the solitary steeple
and down at
the toenails
she has painted pink.
Jonah Raskin lives and writes and performs his work in San Francisco. The author of six poetry chapbooks, including most recently The Thief of Yellow Roses, he has written and published a study of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” titled American Scream.
Crowd
I was in a crowd searching for your jacket.
The crowd was thinning, the concert
Long over, but still your jacket did not appear
Among the others. I wondered if we had,
After all, arrived together, if you’d been beside me,
Whether I’d lost you in the concert hall
Or some time before.
Through the double doors
I thought one fleeting second that I glimpsed
A jacket just like yours and raised my hand
As if I were in third grade and wanted
Someone to call on me, to point to me
And say, “Yes, you,” and then I put my hand
Back down. Not you, no. You were someone else.
D. Eric Parkison is the author of a chapbook, No Arcadia, which was published in the fall of 2020. The Massachusetts Cultural Council awarded him a 2022 Artist’s Grant in poetry. He is programming director at the Gloucester Writers Center and lives in Lynn, MA. Find him at deparkison.com.