Ellen Romano
A Visit to the Country
When Grandma told me she was born
with six fingers on her left hand,
I didn’t yet know what a liar she was.
I don’t see it.
It withered.
I don’t see a withered finger.
It withered away.
She was scrubbing chicken blood
from the table. I’d gagged when Grandpa
brought her the broken-necked bird,
refused to eat it or the watery
boiled potatoes even knowing it meant
I wouldn’t get any sugared blackberries
for dessert. I imagined Grandma floating
above the kitchen table, vile food raining
down on our plates from the invisible sixth finger.
When I excused myself
to use the outhouse, she warned me
to check for snakes before I sat down,
tricking me into looking down the hole.
The next day she mowed down the blackberries
because some city women had tried to pick them.
The Secret Life of Penguins
Orange is every penguin’s favorite color.
It warms them to the tips of their flippers
and sounds to them like polka music,
an ancestral memory from the time
a Lawrence Welk cover band visited Antarctica.
The scarcity of orange in their habitat
fuels their anticipation of the vivid
sunsets that only happen when
the matriarch has hot flashes and they
briefly become capable of flight.
I know, penguins can’t fly, but it is
what it is. When Morgan Freeman
accidentally discovers it, he wins
a Nobel Prize, and the happy-go-lucky
science community can finally
thumb their noses at Isaac Newton
while his pesky apple yells, Psych!
and the penguins fly in formation to the
eternal, internal oom-pah-pah, moving
in concentric rings against the orange-tinted
sky, clockwise, then counterclockwise
like synchronized swimmers, but without the water.
Ellen Romano is an educator, mother, grandmother and widow who lives in Hayward, CA. She writes on the themes of grief, memory and family. She has published work in December Magazine, The Lascaux Review, and the Eunoia Review. She is a Best New Poet nominee.
