Dzvinia Orlowsky

First Rain

In the dark basement, someone
elbowed me hard through the cloud

of my cotton candy dress.
The first heavy rain was about to fall.

Plastic swans wouldn't glide on a paper tablecloth,
their backs filled with salty peanuts.

There was cake, candles easily snapped,
flames escaping toward the ceiling.

Why was everyone leaving?
No stopped music yet, no last chairs.

Watching

The last time I held clover to my face
there was only earth,

a clear sky and in the distance
a young goat crying like a child,

its horns stuck in a wire fence,
head like a large hourglass.

These were our family's ten acres
of meadow grass, the sound

of my parents young and beautiful
preparing for a party;

the hush of my mother's
low cut velvet dress sliding

past her shoulders
as she leaned her hips against

the bar; in my father's hands,
an iced Gimlet shaker, maracas.

Later, everyone's joke was funny,
laughter pitched to the ceiling.

And out through the window
to where I was always lying

in the grass, watching my parents
glide through the party like paper dolls.

They've become so small
they buzz when I lift them to my face.

I'd let them go, but I’m afraid they'd
run away or fall lost among the clover.

2006 Pushcart Prize winner, Dzvinia Orlowsky, is a founding editor of Four Way Books and a contributing editor to AGNI, The Marlboro Review, and Shade. Her previous poetry collections published by Carngie Mellon University Press include A Handful of Bees (1994); Edge of House (1999); and Except for One Obscene Brushstroke (2003). Her fourth collection, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones is forthcoming from CMU in 2008. Her poetry and translations of contemporary Ukrainian poets have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she recently published a translation of Alexander Dovzhenko's novella, The Enchanted Desna (House Between Water Collections, 2006). Dzvinia Orlowsky currently teaches at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing of Pine Manor College in Boston.