Two
poems from Barbara Louise Ungar's The Origin of the Milky
Way
followed
by a note on the author
Matryoshka
You move in me as I
in earth's strange atmosphere,
as
her blue-green ball spins in the expanding darkness –
within
me, you cannot fathom me,
as I can't see the globe I tread, but feel her
warmth,
her motions rocking me
to
sleep, her rest in which I wake, and she
never dreams in whose body she sleeps, turning –
like
Matryoshka dolls, the next nesting
in
the last, we grow and do not know
how or who is holding us, yet we are held.
Izaak
Laughing
I named you for laughter.
Yitzhak, to laugh. In morning sun
I read the paper and sip tea
while you chase Zooey
the cat and practice your laugh.
In
Africa, The horror –
the horror – in Schenectady
Jeffrey Skinner beat
three-month-old Samantha Rio to death.
You
pull yesterday's horrors from the rack,
shred them, stuff some in your mouth
and work like cud. You sit
so beautifully, upright and plumb,
smiling young Buddha
who eats all suffering.
©
Barbara
Louise Ungar was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1956, and
earned her BA from Stanford University, MA from City College
and PhD from the Graduate Center, both of the City University
of New York. An associate professor of English at the College
of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, she lives in Saratoga Springs
with her young son Izaak.
The Origin of the Milky Way won the Gival Press Poetry Award
and is forthcoming from Gival Press. Ungar is the author of
Thrift (WordTech Editions 2005) and a chapbook, Sequel
(Finishing Line Press 2004). Ungar's poems
have appeared in Salmagundi, the Minnesota Review,
the Cream City Review, and many other journals.
.
"Matryoshka"
and "Izaak Laughing" first appeared in the author's
chapbook Sequel (Finishing Line Press, 2004).
