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Listening to Congolese Singer,
Sam Mangwana
Open doorway.
A cot inside velvet darkness,
the child dangles skinny legs,
smiles with all of his seven years.
His mother counts coins,
drops them into her special box
and another dress is done now.
He feels the cotton, sucks his thumb.
Drums across the courtyard. The men drink beer.
Sam Mangwana's band sings "Balobi";
barefoot dancers kick dust,
step lightly on each other's toes.
Sam is hoarse;
his face glows in red light.
On the margins now, the boy
shapes the words with his mouth.
His mother tugs his soft, thick hair.
"You think you know this life?"
Bright words spill out
of Sam's purple lips.
The boy pokes his finger in the gap
between his teeth;
with the other hand
he holds his first chicken,
its head tucked into his armpit.
Before dawn, the boy wakes up hungry.
The moon, a hammered silver platter,
mothers hand-stitching by its light.
My Life as Jane Fonda
I am in Costa Rica, in a chaise lounge near the pool
of the Rose Garden Hotel.
I close my eyes, surrender myself,
as the sun makes false promises to my skin.
Ice cubes chill my lemonade
and the rippling water is soporific,
but, suddenly, my toe hurts.
I look up to see anthracite eyes set in a biscuity face,
and a mouth that says "I know who you are."
He is still pinching very hard
and I'd confess the truth to make him stop
but he does not want to hear,
"I am not Jane Fonda."
I've tried so many times; they just become ugly
at my arrogance and begin to yell
about who did I think I was,
movie tickets were not cheap,
and it does not pay to snub your fans.
And so, one year earlier,
when on a first date with a very nice man
at a birthday party for his sister in a restaurant,
a lady tapped at my shoulder
and wanted my signature for her daughter
who loved me in "9 to 5,"
I looked around at the table of strangers
who cut their eyes at me.
And when I wrote "To Margie, a beautiful little person,
Love, Jane Fonda,"
tears welled up in this lady's eyes and she said,
"You have made a little girl so very happy."
And now this man is still squeezing my toe
as if this were normal behavior.
He does not want to know that I live in an old Victorian house
stuffed with books and flocked with cat hair,
that I teach recalcitrant students by day
and read murder mysteries at night
in pajamas fraying at the elbow.
He asks in a plummy English accent
if I would sign my autograph.
I say Yes, oh, yes and the pressure releases as I
scrawl her name on the pool-side cafe menu.
He believes he is brushing up against the edge
of a pastel universe, and I have let him.
Jimmy
perched on Aunt Gene's porch rail,
ate a ripe fig from her hand,
his powerful crow's beak
leaving no mark on her palm.
Sometimes when she whistled in the evening,
he settled just out of reach,
face smeared with the succulent yolk
of goldfinch eggs,
to remind us that the trees belonged to him,
and the warm California earth.
Once, he landed on my shoulder
and I felt chosen as if the newly crowned
Queen of England herself
had praised me to the heavens,
both of us bathed in the naked light of privilege.
More, really, because I was seven years old
and Jimmy was a dazzling piece
from the jigsaw puzzle of night.
He brushed his head against my neck,
lifted claws from my skin;
against the blue bowl of sky,
he adjusted flight feathers,
winging his name in cursive.
I felt my fifty pounds then
so heavy on that redwood deck.
Rafaella Del Bourgo is a long-time Berkeley resident who teaches English at the college level. She has traveled all over the world and has lived in Tasmania and Hawaii. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals such as WordWrights, Caveat Lector, Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, and The Bitter Oleander; in 2006 she was featured as a Spotlight Artist on the Raintiger website. She has won several awards for her writing, and summer 2001 was a finalist for the Frances Locke Memorial Award for Poetry, and the River Styx Poetry Contest juried by Billy Collins. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002 and 2006, and won the Lullwater Prize for Poetry in winter of 2003. She was the 2006 winner of the Helen Pappas Memorial Prize in Poetry and won the New River Poets Award. In 2007 she won first place in the Maggi H. Meyer Memorial Poetry Contest for the maxi poem and second place for the midi poem. Her first collection of poetry, I Am Not Kissing You, was published in August, 2003. Ms. Del Bourgo lives in a 100 year old Queen Anne Victorian house with her husband and a small herd of cats.(February 2007)
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