Hey Diddle Diddle
Her spoons are spare, sporadic
and spread too thin. The beater,
bent and offended, sulks
in the drawer with the forks,
although the knife was nice before losing
its edge to the jar of pickles.
She knows those pickles.
Those difficulties, fixes, jams,
scrapes and spots. The predicaments
of papayas, plums and passion
fruit. The bananas yellow-dicking
around hoping to avoid the rot
that comes when the moon
turns its back.
And the lack of esteem she gets
from the dishes, dirty and clean.
The sponge has no squeeze for her,
the oven is cold. Too old, too old
they taunt when she burns the toast.
Too cold, too cold for the oatmeal,
the soup and the stew. The beater mutters
in its drawer. Too old, too cold, too old.
.
Weather Forecast
I live inside in a small house,
my name the same, but my past life
sliding away like late afternoon.
The summer when the lilies died,
wild thorns at the edge of skies,
tangerines glowing silently
on a white ceramic plate, bread
leavened with the stain of my own want
the honey these have left me
may never be unbittered.
I stare out the window and the glare
of the sea stares back at me.
I am a painting with its surface scarred,
a book returned to the library,
the rose gone mildewed in the yard.
Like rootless clouds sifted through light,
I will drift away,
a kite with a broken string.
.
Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Her Selected Poems is forthcoming. Her fifth book, What’s Left Over, won the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize for 2022. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, fundamentalism, and sauerkraut.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 