Willa Schneberg

RENDING THE GARMET

The night before my mother goes into the ground

I try to eat

in my hotel near Kennedy,

but since Sept. 11^th

the restaurant is temporarily closed.

In the still open souvenir shop

I find a t-shirt that fits me.

A youth M preshrunk 10-12,

An I ♥

N Y t-shirt.

I go up to my room.

On the wall above my bed is a print

of a colonial lower Manhattan

and outside my window

is bumper to bumper traffic.

My mother is a photograph,

a hoarse voice on the answering machine,

a crocheted afghan of primary colored squares

girded with black wool,

a small coleus with pink spotted leaves

outside apt. 306,

a man in the street with a hole in this throat,

a silver ring with a moonstone

on my index finger.

I pull a t-shirt over my head,

claw at the red heart,

but the fabric won’t rip.

I’m forced to use the small blade

on my nail clipper to make a slit.

Now my hands can tear the heart

that hides the one that beats.

SMOKING RALEIGHS

When my mother still believed

my father was who she wished he was,

she kept a card file of recipes, and

Red Skelton was the voice of Raleigh

whose ads depicted a couple in evening dress—

a man in tails, a woman in a formfitting gown

with a flounce in the back—dancing

as if they owned the hall.

They could have been my parents.

At family affairs distant relatives

asked if they were on the stage,

and my parents flattered and tired

would shake their heads, no

as they left the floor to look for their table.

My mother would sit down demurely;

my father would sit backward,

nonchalantly on a folding chair,

from the inside of his tux jacket

take out the pack, Sir Walter Raleigh

prim on the cover, pat the bottom just enough

for two cigarettes to spring up like skyscrapers,

then pluck a match from the matchbook

of Howard’s bar mitzvah,

or Mollie and Irving’s wedding,

to light the smokes in his mouth and slowly

place one between my mother’s full lips.