Monstrance
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
Your memory, like a monstrance, glows in me!
—Baudelaire
A sunburst of brass brutalizes the whole chapel.
Within this gleaming blast, a lone wafer, pulling
to its orbit four cranberry candles,
an ostracism of gold and red. An empire.
A Jesus built of plaster shines. He wears a robe
the colour of meat and immolates before my eyes.
I’ve come here as a blazing ball of wrath,
hoping to soothe sin's near occasion, the urge
to drop my bomb full of syllables.
But for relief, I have to lift my gaze.
to the high and pale mosaic vault
to cerulean and seafoam windows
edged with icy lemon leaves.
I look up. The peace of blue. I can’t look down.
Metal explodes, and body and blood
spatter the whole world.
I Am Held Against My Will
Did I tell you that I was kidnapped
by a winter rain beating on my roof,
until I could not leave the bed with its
handcuffs of warm down, some predating you?
This morning, I looked at my coffee cup
so intently in the circle of a halogen bulb,
I learned how steam curls and then dissolves
like ghost fingers on a harp. I learned that lamps
make a tiny buzz, which is
imperceptible on a normal day. That is,
a day I am not held captive by coverlets.
You might think the furniture, all straight
dark wood and military hardware
would rescue me.
It does announce
that my tracksuit and ear buds
wait in cabinets for my
liberation. But you already know—freedom
is the luxury of dumb summer
when the first apricot light
drips through the blinds.
Freedom is chimeric
when light is gunmetal. When sabres
of water slash the air. When from this
fabric bunker I hear
the swish of tires on the wet road.
Did I tell you that once I knew
what to do in bed?—
but the years have
confused me, or maybe shamed me.
Someone my age has no business with desire,
and I wish it would just
flow away from me
down a gully in the lawn
and drain to the sea.
Did I tell you they’re getting more common,
these hostage crises?
The Fists of Two Strange Men
The man next door owns a tiny ginger dog. But once he had a yellow lab that he let wander. I asked him nicely to keep the lab out of the road, so I wouldn’t hit her when backing out my car. The man raised his fist. He swung it past my shoulder.
The man around the corner has cleaned his property. But once he sold firewood with a spray-painted sign. I didn’t know it, but my husband reported him to the town. One day, as I walked by, the man screamed at me about my husband. He pushed his fists forward, battering the air.
Why did the fists of two strange men punch out at me? What rights did these fists believe they had? More than once, I have imagined one or the other of these men, stricken in his yard with a blue-faced heart attack, fists beating the earth. I don’t run out to help. I smile behind the curtains of my room.
Black Rosary
When you die, your guardian angel
stabs you with her little sword,
as Sister Mary Cornelius said
in third-grade catechism.
That whole school year
I begged my angel every night
not to run me through.
I only stopped this prayer
after I told my mother,
who cough-laughed,
“Don’t be ridiculous,”
over her burning L & M.
Then my father let me
use his black rosary
of Bakelite beads.
He got it from his friend
Father Finn, when they all
hung out after the war
in Florida, fishing. About
my angel, my father
told me to use my judgment
at age eight. A black rosary
from Florida felt devilish,
something spilling from fish guts
while Father Finn cleaned
a pez diablo. Black demon-
beads, cigarettes, and my
assassin. Some guardians.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her new book of translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, was published by Monkfish in 2024. Delibovi’s work has appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, Fish Barrel Review, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, co-winner of the 2023 Hueston Woods Poetry Contest, and a 2024 Best of the Net nominee. Delibovi is consulting poetry editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street.
