Bonds of Love

February often brings relationships to mind, and the poems in this month’s issue offer views of three different kinds of love. Joseph Bathanti’s “Lasciare Stare” is a beautifully written memory of a tender interaction between the author’s parents. In “Love Language,” a striking poem by Madelyn Chen, the speaker cares for an unnamed man by bringing him flowers. Bob Hicok’s “The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (V)” describes the impossible task of eulogizing a relationship that has no end, even after death. You can listen to recordings of the poems by clicking the Play buttons below.

Take care and read well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

 

Lasciare Stare
By Joseph Bathanti

My mother was not one to suffer reprimand.
Yet there were times when my father,
at his end of the table,
gently lifted a hand

to quell whatever
had her worked up
and said in Italian—
because he didn’t want my sister Marie

and me to know he’d intervened—
Lasciare stare, meaning Let it be.
A hand lifted not in ire, but instead
supplicant, palm up, open,

though forged in fire
and ore at Edgar Thomson Steel.
We were about to have supper
in the dining room on Prince Street.

From the mantel gazed
our astonished baby portraits,
bronzed booties embedded
in bronze frames.

Marie and I still played with toys.
My mother had been cooking,
sewing, scrubbing spotless over
and over the spotless house.

My father was on strike,
scrounging daily the streets
for an odd job under the table.
There was an even chance

my mother would take exception
to his lasciare stare.
But each time, he finessed it.
She adored he’d pled in Italian.

The sound of lasciare stare
is like a pastry: rich, pliant.
Marie and I heard luscious
and envisioned Moio’s eclairs.

My mother heard luscious too
and smiled omnipotently.
Wands of sun streamed through the sheers,
streaked her brown hair.

My father took a puff from his Camel
and dispatched his message
in smoky cursive, Lasciare stare,
then said it again softly,

and my mother said it too—
casting a spell over us. 
Such evenings, after we’d eaten,
anything might occur.

A drive past Highland Park Zoo:
Water buffalo and kudu
penned along the road
stared at our Plymouth

with viridescent, otherworldly eyes.
Then the Dairy Queen
on Washington Boulevard,
next to Silver Lake Drive-In,

where on the gargantuan screen
entire lives silently hatched,
and as we licked our perfect white cones,
clefs curled at the crests,

my mother—in a smart dress,
lipstick, heels, her good coat—
turned from shotgun to Marie and me,
theatrically draped an arm

across the ridge of the long front seat,
and winked.

Love Language
By Madelyn Chen

I read somewhere that most men receive flowers
for the first time at their funeral. So I filled a vase
in your apartment with puckered roses, sunflowers cut
at the morning farmers market, daisies thick with pollen,
lilies vivid as the dregs of sunset. Placed a violet orchid
on your windowsill, its tender buds blossoming with the
spring days. Jacaranda season is my favorite in this city
where tree leaves are green parrots. Some weekends I come
over just to pour the yellowed water out of the vase and fill it
with clear water from the tap. I cut my hand tearing thorns
off your roses, but I keep bandages in my purse and did not
want you to bleed. No, you never said thank you. Yes, you
never asked for any of it, and I never told you I loved you.
But what more did you want from me.

The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (V)
By Bob Hicok

There are all these calculators online. Square feet
into yards of stone. (Square feet have boring toes.)
The number of combinations you can make
with three digits or ninety socks or seven kinds
of joy. How long it takes to mow your lawn,
train your dog to read The Little Prince, grow up. 
Did you love him, the calculator for how long it takes
to write your father’s eulogy asks straightaway.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays but not Wednesdays?
Did he teach you how to throw a party or a punch?
Was he home when he was home or somewhere else,
a hearth of a man or more of a cloud that lost its way?
Have you become him? If you have, would you say so
in a crowd of soccer hooligans or only to yourself?
Did you love him when you were ten but not twenty,
then again at thirty-five? Is he secretly alive?
Are you writing his eulogy in advance? Are you afraid
to sleep at night? Afraid your bones are planning
their escape? And what do you mean by love?
That he bought you a red bike, a moody horse, a kite
that had a kite of its own? That he made you believe
you could be anything—a dirigible, a parable, the inventor
of a new kind of love? Did you ever ask
what he wanted to be when he grew up? If he ever needed
a day off from being your dad? Are you sad for real
or fake sad? Sad like people on TV are sad,
or like a lost, wet dog in February, or the moon
out there on its own? When I finished the questions,
the calculator told me the eulogy
would take my whole life and then some,
that assessing, praising, debating, hating, loving a father
is a river that runs dry only when you die.
There’s also a calculator for how long it takes
to dig a hole in a mountain, in water, or in
another hole. When you bury a parent,
you bury the beginning of your life.