Six Poems
by Dina Friedman
MAGENTA
Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, we played a game
about building cities. You scored points by lying
on fields between the walls and placing pink markers
to steal territory. Earlier I listened
to indigenous speakers lamenting loss of their land,
made a pastry with cranberries
harvested from the place the pilgrims landed
Wondered what truth in bogs.
Magenta juices spilled onto the oven’s bottom,
refusing to be smothered by my pale and doughy crust.
As the sun began to sink, I hauled shed limbs,
raked up the last of the leaves,
stamped down the pile
to make it smaller.
The tree watched me
with the eyes of its pecked trunk.
BLOODSISTER
In the second grade closet, we pricked our fingers,
pressed the pads, becoming sisters.
At my bolted desk, I’d wait for your twist,
catty corner toward my seat,
trying to assess your lips.
Even when you smiled, more gone
than the chip on your tooth, the gummy gap’s
sharp edge poking through. I couldn’t smile.
My lips were glue, too often struck
when your face turned to scowl, an inverted U;
couldn’t frown back at you either, only
in the mirror, behind my closed door.
I loved you so badly, willing to bleed
and wait for that slight shoulder shift
that marked your turning, wanting to be
your hair back then. Not the bound, barretted
bangs—the perfect, untangled ends.
*Published in Love: What We Talk When We Talk About It, Darkhouse Books, 2020
CICATRIX
We have a word for the tough covering
of skin over scars, but what’s the word
for a wound still open, slot canyon
corralling a body’s infection? What’s
the word for a tree, alone and sick
in the woods? Or a planet fighting
invisible gasses? Imagine a festering gut,
earth’s core eaten from the inside out. Cicatrix:
the same word used for the newer, tougher
bark, if the tree recovers, but no word
for the loneliness of disintegration, the tumble
of ice off a glacier into churning water.
When a tree’s trunk hardens
in its hollowing, we name it snag,
word used for obstacles in plans, divine
or otherwise. It stands for years
before its outside softens, sponge-like,
sloughs into pieces on the muddy ground
no longer a dependable marker at the fork.
What’s the word for a gnarled path, for the wrong path,
for a perilous adventure to the great beyond
worthy of blockbuster cinema, the hero
prevailing? What’s the word for a journey
to a thousand-cut death, levees sinking
as the water rises? No heroes, stitches
strong enough to suture spreading sores.
No quick fix. No cicatrix.
*Published in Kairos Literary Magazine, April 2023
OF BLOOD AND STONES
It was a gentle moment when the blood stopped
like the slow evaporation of water from mud
we watched her body harden—petrified wood
though you swear you saw her petrified gaze
shooting its last wild hope
before she let go
leaving only rocks to place on a grave
malachite, aventurine, shells from visits to spectacular oceans
and the purring cat lying in the sun
his heart warm against the earth
OMENS
“Even a small cut can sing all day.”
After Cecilia Llompart
Last night, you dreamed yourself
pitching over stairs again,
corralling toward the subway’s bottom
your vision fixed on mustard-hued tiled walls,
You slipped so fast
you couldn’t feel the prick
of stone edges, history of a thousand soles slapping,
coated grease of a half-eaten hot-dog
flung without the wrapper, the leaked turd
from the stupored man sleeping in the landing,
his soiled shame, spoilage
a word reserved only for the visible,
you tumbled in the night’s thick wrap
waking before you found yourself.
Was it the noise that jolted you,
the E’s squeaky wheels; F’s silly ding-dong.
Or did you suspend the fall
because it was only a passage
to where you thought you were going?
TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT
When my head was cut, it was supposed to roll. There were supposed to be severed sinews in the neck, muscles released after fifty years of dull ache—a spurt of blood happy as an orgasm. I expected that like a chicken
the rest of my body might spend a few headless seconds pacing the contours of the bathroom, circumventing the toilet, stepping over the cat litter box, perhaps washing its hands, since dismemberment is a messy business. I didn’t
count on my heart to shrivel so quickly, before I could reach palm against chest to feel its last beats, or think my head would remain alive for more than the number of nanoseconds between evil act committed and recognition of evil act committed. What I didn’t anticipate
was that fuzzy in-between state, an ability to hear and sense without pain in the neck, to smell manure, taste whatever anyone brave enough might put on my tongue—like the head offered on a silver platter for Salome
not what she thought she wanted: a head like a pet, nestled by her feet as she slept; a head like a canary in a cage singing to the sunny morning even when the morning wasn’t sunny. Now, what I know is that dismemberment contains the false posit
that once upon a time we were members of something: humanity, the promise of the Messiah, a cult of mean girls.
*Published in Passengers Journal, September 2022
BIO: Dina Friedman has published in many literary journals including Salamander, Rattle, The Sun, Mass Poetry, Chautauqua Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cold Mountain Review, Lilith, Negative Capability and Rhino and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two books of poetry, Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary, Whirling (Querencia Press). Dina’s fiction includes the short-story collection Immigrants (Creators Press) and two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). To learn more about Dina, visit her website at www.ddinafriedman.com. and subscribe to her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at ddinafriedman.substack.com.