The wine grapes littering the lawn are good enough
to eat. They are slightly frozen, tiny popsicles
that cool my tongue as I shiver in the aftermath
of the midday storm. Within me, there is Rosy,
fermenting like the wine brick her husband dissolved
in some tucked-away corner of the cupboard.
A ghost lingers in the mist as I breathe her in
to lie with the sickly wine of my stomach. Rosa
of Naples, there is a mysterious line that connects us.
It travels into the caverns of my gut where pomace
disintegrates. On a night off, were you struck blind
by tainted hooch in some long-forgotten speakeasy?
I don’t even know what you drank, if anything,
besides gray-market vino in the tight quarters of home.
I follow the tenuous string into my center, and we find
ourselves lost inside a continent we could leave
someday again. Your boy held your hand in the dark.
One Thanksgiving, my mother, her body locked up,
held my shoulders as I walked her through
your granddaughter’s hallways. Did you, like her,
tell your boy he had a feminine side as he shepherded
you through your web of sightlessness? Within my belly,
in the slough that sloshes through me, you are hazy
as the mist-made ghost of the lawn. Once a line is known,
and it bores into the gut, it forks forever from the tongue.
Matthew DeMarco (he/they) lives in California. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Sporklet, Glass, The McNeese Review, Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. His collaborations with Faizan Syed have been anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). He tweets sporadically from @M_DeMarco_Words.