Deborah Pintonelli

Let’s Get Rid of Nature
(for Peter Christensen)

Nature, you’re just a bad mother.
Provoker of cycles of neverending
Thickening and thinning.
Emptying and refilling.
You’re just a sentimental journey you sentimental journey you
Hammer-and-sickle in a Roman Skyline,
The shy, dead buds on my cheek
In the afternoon.

You fill my head with the weight of stones
Biblical-wet and old.
I find you pink and pretty,
Flowers strewn over willing mud.
And my eyes turn glassy and starless
And my thoughts turn mild and meek,
Like some pale madonna
Waiting, waiting.

You pull the heart from me and serve it
On a tray, in the deep woods: some dumb shelter.
Wicked stepmother, you cloak me in colors
Only to fashion my disaster
With a foot too big for marriage
And a taste for apples, apples and more apples.

You old grey mare
Those fat stars in the sky make my head ache.
Your little cottage in the woods
O’ergrown with ivy and moss, so lovesick and spoony
Eats my air.
The fair moon and her attending orbs
Are half-sisters wicked and ugly.
They shut me in closets
Chop off my hair, leave me for pumpkins
With my face in the dust of someone else’s fire.

–Deborah Pintonelli

Poetry