Bruce Whitacre | Christmas Oranges

CHRISTMAS ORANGES

The children were not to watch

as Father unloaded the snowcapped wagon.

Crates and bushels went straight to the cellar

and under an Indian blanket.

Father pocketed the key with a wink.

Jennie had to sit to keep breathing,

her hands trembling as she cracked the walnuts.

 

That evening, candles clipped to the fir were lit.

Their dots of light graced the gingham bows, the popcorn

strings, casting deep shadows in the parlor corners.

Atop the white tablecloth brought from Ohio,

turkey with stuffing, yams, and fruit pies crowded

the table, so everyone ate standing or in the parlor.

Mother fanned herself at the fire, exhausted, while

Nora, the hired girl, hovered, hiding homesick tears.

Family and neighbors joined in rolling up the rugs,

then with fiddles and dancing. Jennie missed the beat.

Stepping to the window, she gazed through the frosted panes.

Stars arched over the prairie. Horses stomped under their blankets.

 

Father called her into the kitchen.

“I want you to see these first, Jennie. Remember?”

His carpenter’s hands, deft and hard, pried a crate open.

Golden spheres burned into view, sweet and strange.

“Oranges!” she cried. Father laughed, “They made the last train.”

She remembered from last year to peel them first

The flesh exploded in her mouth —

Ocean. Green. Warm. Sunshine.

She closed her eyes and swallowed. Not here, in one taste.

 

She carried a bowlful into the parlor.

The music stopped. The dancers paused.

She beamed as everyone surrounded her, each reaching for

an orange, the only ones any of them would eat that year.

The night froze in her memory like crystals on the panes

melting into a tale from time to time, like now,

for me, then freezing again for the next blue hour.

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today, and was recently nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues.  He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. An activist and advocate for the arts and social justice, Bruce lives in Forest Hills, Queens.

Bruce Whitacre | The Ecru Shirt

The Ecru Shirt

 

I never knew anyone else who claimed it,

But Dad insisted it was his favorite color.

When our young family moved into our $25,000

Custom-bilt split-level, the kitchen was yellow-warm.

 

Our motorboat had a goldenrod dual hull.

He could not mount his skis himself,

But he spent entire weekends towing

His sons tandem in his sparkling wake.

 

Having a favorite color is convenient to others,

An easy default for ties, appliances, even for cars,

But it captured as well his warmth and his wit,

His mellowing with age into a crusty outlier.

 

Flipping through his closet the day after,

We chose the parti-colored sport coat;

It matched the well-worn ecru shirt.

And so he went loudly to the grave.

 

 

 

_____________________________

Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared in Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is an activist and advocate for the arts and social justice. He lives in Forest Hills, Queens.

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko | Childhood

Childhood

Your first drawing is of the sun

You color it round   yellow   bright

like the bouncing ball your father gives you

when you are just three   What delight

you take in both losing and reclaiming it together

as you run far through the leaves with the sky and the wind

Now he thinks you will remember

what it feels like . . . to hold a world in your hands

Your mother’s world is of a different light   She will hold you

in the spell of  her song which will assume different shapes   At first

you will want to carry it with you wherever you go   One day  it will

take you to deep places that move you as she fades quietly

like the melody or the more subtle color you use to paint a dream

 

Your dream is your portal to the world

Drawn through the rainbow of your imagination

it is being colored continually by your perceptions

You will spend most of your childhood in its sphere

Here   you polish the moon and shine the stars

and trace your name on fragile glass   You wonder

where the blue begins and worry about where it ends

 

Most of the time you spend waiting 

waiting for your father to one day return

waiting for your mother to come tuck you in

waiting for loneliness to leave you alone

The terror of the dark   The terror of your song

catching in your throat like a kite in the branches of trees

 

Later   of course   there is the terror of stumbling through

entire sentences

of being lost among strangers so tall

you cannot see their faces   and

of the hand that once firmly held yours . . . slipping away

Much later   of course   there is the terror

of losing most of your crayons

______________________________

A former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, Antonia Alexandra Klimenko is widely published. Her work appears, among other publications, in XXI Century World Literature (she represents France) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris. Her collected poems On the Way to Invisible is forthcoming, Spring of 2021.