Poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz

Masterpiece

In the painting, he is about to get
what each time is his heart’s desire: access,

the surge, the insecurity turning
into affirmation, fulfillment, release.

Her face shows she feels it too. She is the
fruit bowl on the table, and he is hungry,

knows touching her will be like drinking the
wine in the bottle set beside the unlit

candle, for she is the only source of
illumination in the room, a brilliance

born apart from her budding breasts, that light
which ignites him as undeniable and

cruel as her destiny held captive in
a frame with fingers reaching out to take her

like the bread on the plate he’s entitled to,
which fills but can’t sustain, the crust discarded

before he’s done, crumbs she will sweep from the
table, feed to the pigeons in the morning.

–

Naked in the Moon

The summer was a short one. Too many
people who were there are now absent at
all our other gatherings, their chairs bare,
the stories we tell about them become
repetitive, grandchildren knowing the
endings before we arrive. The lake waits
outside the window for us to return,
yet since then we have stayed on our separate
islands, the boys growing grey in their beards,
the girls missing flat stomachs and August
tans, still suffering somewhere impatience
of parents who were just beginning to
learn what we all can see, how bodies change,
the nature of memory alters, the
pieces of what we lived scattered on the
shore, glistening in the round beach pebbles
at sunset, their flecks of quartz catching the
light without effort. How deep is the lake,
how far do we have to go down to reach
bottom, our snorkels irrelevant, the
pressure in our ears too much to bear, you
ever sitting at the end of the dock,
splashing at the dark, naked in the moon.

Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poetry and fiction have appeared widely, most recently in Fortnightly Review, Pudding House, Heartwood, and Mobius. She is the author of Turning Inside Out, The Way You Will Go, Lost in Transition, and When I Fell, a novel with 78 color illustrations by Kathy Skerritt.