Ally Malinenko- Three Poems

The Good Life

She can’t follow the accumulation.

She looks from the pictures to the floor,

to the books.

Her eyes glance down the hall, unfocused.

They have lived here longer than anywhere

as two people.

They have lived as two people nearly

as long as one.

And that too is shocking.

As if she is too young and stupid to see

how narrow and grave the road through life is.

As if at the end of the hall there is a house

full of the choices that she did not make. Things she did not collect.

On the wall the photos from Madrid

remind her how blue the sky is in a country she don’t live in.

It is a snapshot, a place left raw

and tastes sharp like a stone on her tongue.

The way memory tastes.

When thinking about how many people there are in the world,

she says, sometimes her throat closes.

All those people touched and untouched,

gathering together, coming apart again,

filling bookshelves and painting the nursery.

Filling a life with the things they can hold on to

and putting into those things what is owed back to them.

Proof of their very own existence

in the painted walls and the banged up cupboards.

I can’t stand it, she says. It makes her scream.

Her lungs so dry they crackle like leaves blown against a building

that sits on a dead end,

in a city

on a planet

in a universe

she’ll never visit again.

Savagery

 

While I understand it is a savagery

that over time will be

abated

though never

extinguished

and that it grows from

intuition

and not

understanding

I still find it terrifyingly poignant

to watch a shrieking toddler

chase a pigeon

with such ferocious determination

as if the world

and all our little helpless

lives

were his to

crush

between

those tiny

sticky

fingers.

Summer Lake, Late Nineties

 

It was not the trees or the light

or the sound of the leaves underfoot.

It was not the lake

or the moon or the joints we had smoked.

It was not the child’s swing set

or the giggle of girls when their bras were undone.

It was not the sound of sex

the hush and moan of desperate release.

It was the simple conversation we had

of all the things we were going to do and be

before we were even anything.

It was the slow creak of the swings,

the whispered voices

or the occasional braying cackle

that split the night and betrayed our hiding spot

that let me know,

in a way one shouldn’t know

that we were there,

alive in that moment,

and we were young,

so very very young

even though we pretended we were old.

So young that we could still hear the

steady throb of our hearts,

the shiver of bones that stretched

in skin tightened by the lake water.

So horribly breakable young that

some of us will not survive and

some of us will stay this way.

Too young to realize that

this time was,

mercifully,

not going to last.