Fragile
1.
She lives
with mirrors
for sisters.
2.
If she’d
been exposed
to poems
as a girl
she might
be okay
alone.
3.
Rags
disgust her.
She never thinks
about god
although she thinks
god is a well-groomed
man in dark Armani.
4.
She stares at men
who lift their little daughters
with strong arms.
Her father lasted one motel.
5.
What can she not bear?
The dream, recurring,
in which a golden man
tells her no.
How, she ruminates,
can he be so happy?
6.
I want to believe
that her goodness
is not lost as I search
for my own.
Who, after all, can know
when and where
the trigger of salvation
will at last be pulled?
News of War
comes in the slanting slicing overnight sleet
and can be read in the hung eyes of yard dogs;
it causes deviations in the flight paths of gulls.
The open windows of meeting houses
slam shut of their own accord; the news
untunes a hundred acoustic guitars.
In sympathy with the dead and wounded,
babies wail across a thousand miles of jagged borders.
Men write desperate questions in the margins
of the history books given them by their fathers.
Nobody’s heart is quite right, but in theirs, mothers
bear the bombs of children who’ve been killed
or grown into killers.
Steven Ostrowski's recent publications are a novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone; a poetry chapbook, Persons of Interest (winner of the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Prize) and a book of poems, Life Field.