Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Two Poems
Lingua Naturae
The green promise of new leaves
opened like a jewelry box this morning,
the one I remember
from my mother’s dresser;
it was leather, gray as the leafless
branches of last week’s trees.
I can still hear the brass hinges
click open. And from the larger
box of our family house,
still hear my father’s voice, his anger
that seems endless
and without mercy like the sky.
Last chance, he warns
in a kind of shadow chorus
with these trees. Last chance.
And I think back to those bare
branches of last week,
so late to bloom.
And how for a moment,
I feared they never would.
How to Bear the News
I swipe my finger
down the iPhone screen,
until the stories blur
and I can no longer read them,
a window in heavy rain,
water pouring down
from overflowing gutters
And for those few moments,
the clicking of the phone
as I scroll through
is like the cricket I once
discovered as a child
in a pause between
bursts of torrential rain;
it must have entered the house
on a pant leg or a sock.
I followed its sound
to a dusty corner
of the living room
and took solace
in its green company.
—Submitted on 06/25/2020
Sally Bliumis-Dunn is the author of Echolocation (MadHat Press, 2018), Second Skin (Wind Publications, 2010), and Talking Underwater (Wind Publications, 2007). Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and other journals. Bliumis-Dunn teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College in Harrison, NY.
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