LOUIS GALLO - POEMS

Louis Gallo’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth,  Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others.  Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books:  A New Orleans Review.  He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

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                                            OLD HOUSE
                         
​                                                            for Cathy
 
                       1.
 
                       We take the long way
                       so our baby can see
                       October fire in the trees.
                       You hated the house
                       when we lived in it
                       and so did I.
                       I sensed my other child
                       in every room,
                       heard her call my name
                       long after she was gone.
                       You saw traces
                       of another woman.
                       Yet what a time we had
                       that year we stayed
                       waiting for the sale.
                       We sat outside in snow
                       to gaze at stars
                       crisp as sugar.
                       I felt blood course
                       through your hand--
                       the hours we spent
                       exploring each other's
                       unfamiliar flesh
                       despite ghosts and fear.
                       It has been five years
                       and now safe enough
                       to visit.
                       It seems so small,
                       you exclaim, as we pass--
                       and dingy, I add,
                       who would paint a house
                       the color of skin?
                       Yet we can't stop looking,
                       turn the car around,
                       circle the block.
                       It's just another house,
                       I sigh and shift my eyes
                       to the road for good.      
 
                       2.
                   
                       When we stop at McDonald's
                       I pluck an apple from a tree
                       next to the parking lot
                       and prop it on the dashboard.
                       You offer to drive home
                       to our new town
                       and I sit in back with Claire
                       who, strapped in her seat,
                       can't stop smiling.
                       She will never know this place;
                       I will never hear her call
                       from desolate rooms.
                       I mourn that other child
                       as our baby curls
                       her tiny fingers
                       around my thumb.
                       We stop again, for cider
                       at a roadside stand.
                       I watch you walk
                       toward rows of jugs
                       and pick one out.
                       You look so beautiful
                       I want to sing out.
                       We are done with history
                       for a while and speed
                       out of the past.
                       I reach over your seat
                       for the apple
                       but you fling it
                       out the window.
                       I watch that last token
                       of remembrance
                       careen backward, fall,
                       shatter to bits
                       on the interstate.      
 

​                                      MULBERRIES
 
 
                         Each day, as they bloom, I pluck a mulberry
                         from our tree and chew it up.  A modest berry,
                         lacking distinction and taste, but faithful, profuse.
                         I have done this every summer for a decade,
                         turned it into a kind of sacrament.  They don’t last long.
                         I’m devouring July, I tell the tree, which listens.
                         I’m eating time, bit by bit.
 
                         The tree thrives in a swirl of lanky pines
                         near the back driveway.  Once the berries go,
                         it almost seems to disappear.  No one, I think,
                         notices but me and the birds that feast on its fruit
                         and deposit purple splotches on our windshields.
                         But I know when the searing cold returns
                         and long dark days enshroud the mind
                         I will stand again beside the garbage cans
                         and tally not only the seasons, but the life,
                         yearning again for the mulberries’ inauspicious return.
                         This is no feast for pleasure, no picnic
                         or burst of gustatory delight. This is prayer.
                         I eat prayers, I tell the tree as its unglamorous leaves
                         flutter with gusts sweeping in from the mountains.
                         The tree consents, tolerates me in a way
                         that I, with almost nothing in my hands,
                         vaguely understand. 
                 
                      
 

                           

​                                                            NECKLACE
 
 
 
                This chain of incidents
                should loosen with accumulation
                but the cinch tightens, rubies drop
                like dried seeds, popping into sand.
                Some moments swell like a lizard’s throat,
                others drip into creamy vats
                of terrifying sweetness
                until the entire windswept past congeals.
                No necklace but a monument
                droops from your neck
                as you dive into furrows
                to root for something
                severe and holy.

                                OMENS
 
​
A red asparagus came with the bundle
and we, who nurture the quotidian,
could not eat.  The next morning
a cocoanut exploded in St. Augustine,
bananas torpedoed out of their skins,
the square avocado leaked blood,
and we, devotees of signs, starved to death.
All Jerico mourned, feasted on our remains.
The dogs carried off a few ribs, pilgrims
some lockets of straw and singed hair.
There will be no progress, cried the viceroy,
until we suppress the noose of superstition--
whereupon he decreed creole tomatoes obscene.
We, meanwhile, penitent as stone,
picked at entrails, ghastly our demeanor.