Bach Prelude in C
You know, I’m one of the last generations that will die, he says,
lying on the couch after surgery. The skiing accident, the fractured
backbone. His voice doesn’t crack. Death makes no evolutionary
sense these days, we’re almost past it. I really do believe that. Braids
his fingers. When I was four, I sat on his knees at the keyboard
and slid my hands over those freckled knuckles as he traced
one chord at a time. I called it “Snowflakes.” The geometric shape
of each bar spelled symmetry, crystalline patterns I could learn
like prayer. No part of my mind believes he’s mortal. It goes left
to right, each arpeggiated measure, bass to treble, one hand to the other.
Still, now, I can feel the keys beneath his hands beneath my hands.
Newborn
Slotting lines into a sonnet till the rhyme runs true,
or mixing broth and barley for a stew,
these were handiworks you knew, and knew.
But this living text that never reads
the same, river you can’t step into twice,
whose cells are constantly replaced, regrown, revised—
this of your body and your mother’s body
(which formed the egg inside of you […]
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Elegy
A string of lobster buoys bobs against
the clapboard shed, cracked yellows
and reds against faded white wall.
The rooster’s wailing next door in the yard
where your grandma used to call you in
for supper. Our child has blood here
though it’s never been my home. Mourning
doves call through the trees, over cicada static,
the wind exhaling summer leaf-shadow.
On the phone, left by that store, you pause: […]
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Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, the Fugue Poetry Contest, and the Morton Marr Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of the 2016 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Salamander, Measure, 32 Poems, and other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she was a Robert Pinsky Teaching Fellow and a teaching artist at the Boston Arts Academy. Lisa’s debut novel, Inevitable and Only, was named one of Barnes & Noble’s “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”