Patricia Gomes

Boston, Brockton, Lakeville

Rolling backwards on the train,
five birch trees pass my window.
Clustered and white-fragile, they are nuns on Saturday afternoon
discussing the transportation of the Host from their kitchen to the altar—
a serious subject.
Their bark has been stripped at waist height
by a blemished boy pick-pondering his gender uncertainty,
or by things less gossip-worthy, like
mutated caterpillars.
There are tattoos in the seat ahead, a gallery exhibit in flesh.
What hair remains is flattened
under a faded bandana. I refuse his coffee breath offer
of the Daily News, preferring the scenic route
of dumped tires and the loading docks
of tax empty factories.
In another life, the next, or the one after that,
I wake up
born
behind a decrepit factory such as these
rolling backwards pass my window.
I am a rat,
a newborn rat.
Raw-bald pink and eyeless.
My mother is gone.
Or dead. She is dead, run over
by the train on her way back
to me with food.
I know this instinctively.
Mewling my grief, but hunger being stronger
than mother-love for a mother at whose teat
I nursed only the barest of seconds,
I gnaw my tail. I am a circle.
A circle
of spinning, click-clicking rat feet,
struggling for purchase on fallen bricks.
Mother, O Mother; why hast thou forsaken me?
Until some rank-mouthed truants, grimy and one more arrest
away from hard time
come
back here to smoke
a novice-rolled bone
and take the stolen time
to drop a cement block
on me.

Grandmother Oak: Splintered

I.

In blissful contemplation,
Roman chews on a blue kitchen sponge.
Works his four little teeth for all they're worth.
He is content
with unsugared rolled oats
and bells on a string.
He is a Lesson, But I
am a rebellious pupil.

II.

My mother taught me never to take my shoes off
during the day. You may have to go somewhere
in a hurry, or company might pop in
and you'd appear sloppy and underdressed.
Her shoes stay on from breakfast to bed.

Always put a robe across the foot of your bed
when you turn in. You may have to run outside
should the house catch fire during the night
and you wouldn't want people to see you undressed.
Her robe is a chaste white. It is thick,
therefore unrevealing.

My mother taught me to get out of peoples' way.
Let them pass first; let them go ahead of you.
Tuck in — make yourself small.
Take less space.
Small is good.
Petite,
always petite.

I am not petite.

She is the buttercup, and I
the mighty oak,
casting shadows over her garden.

My mother did not teach me to scream.
That's a trick I learned on my own
and have been doing ever since.
As loud
and as often
as I can.

The Logistics of Blind Faith

I’ve never tasted Holy Water,
never had the nerve.
They tell me
to stop being illogical — it's just

water

and that no man's thumb
can really contain the power
to sanctify a common element.
The collar is, after all, only cloth.

Perhaps. But looking into the marble font,
fingering its cold cracked rim,
I imagine dead white lilies,
their juices extracted
by a mashing pestle made from Jesus' tibia,
ground to ghostly rumor
in a mortar carved from the pelvic bone
of His mother.

It would taste like tornadoes and arctic blizzards,
suicide and childbirth; it would taste like

truth.

To swallow such a concoction
would surely make my sins visible
to the masses. Risky business
best avoided. Business
has no place
in a temple.

Rubber Politics at the End of Term

I'm of a crooked mindset,
a salamander mounting a reluctant scorpion.
It was evident to the moth I tried to drown
in the garden tonight.
Minding its own business, poor thing,
until I came along with the garden hose.
I kept at it,
spraying and spraying and spraying
as it struggled
against the unexpected torrent
that soaked its wings into futility;
there had been no warning signs, no clouds,
no droplet breeze.
I was not in the least disturbed
by my intention to destroy the pallid creature.
As we battled, the moth became
the neighbor grilling codfish,
the unwanted phone call,
the continual argument,
the contested ideology,
the deviant religion,
the direct order from above,
and finally, the unctuous Law Giver.
I kept at it,
spraying and spraying and spraying
and spraying and spraying
until
I grew ridiculous
and sprouted wings.

To Achieve Notice

There is mystery in a plain, black journal.
You assume its owner is interesting, well,
at least more interesting
than you.
A plain, black journal
carried in public
catches the eye.
A chance to peek inside
a brilliant mind.
A plain, black journal could
house the manifesto of a wire-splitting lunatic in an unheated cabin,
portraits sketched by a murderous degenerate in a shag-carpeted motel room,
love poems from the pen of an undiscovered virginal master, forty years old
in a burgundy room, lamps draped with chiffon scarves,
still dreaming, still praying ….

Or it could contain

nothing. Page after page
unwritten and fallow. Which would, of course,
only enhance the owner's appeal.
A plain black journal could contain
the answers you're seeking
so desperately.
You
should have one — a plain, black journal;
it seems THE thing to have.
And for it to be really mysterious,
for you to gain instant attention,
I know because I've seen it done
all you need do is glue
a tiny drawing to the cover. A primitive,
a child's rendering
of
a pale fish.

Patricia Gomes is the author of Stroking Castro's Beard, A Scheduled Departure, and co-author of Simple Truths and Coughing Things with Michael Paul Ladanyi, she is the editor of Adagio Verse Quarterly, as well as an interviewer for Lily – An Online Literary Journal. Ms. Gomes is the poetry moderator of iVillage's ® Poets Workshop. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies.