Four Poems

Kaleidoscope

We’re warned all water drains to sewers.
In rivers, fathers who escape
the house wash hands after weeding.

The run-off teems the flow:
Dillard’s fish flashes
then dissolves like so much.

On the bank, men’s shadows
beam as black bears might
upend themselves,

rocks in the stream,
their furred mouths
gleaming with the catch.

Westward

for A. B.

Lip the rivulet, cold,
brown, and old;

your glow glints from
the collapsed town limits.

I ride on toward my
anonymity’s wildness;

I roam the city
murmuring I am

young, my heart is strong,
and I can take it.

Relish

My teeth break
the casing, all
vinegar and salt;

I swallow the sweet
bread, the ball-
park’s steam.

Pans of hot
water, mustard
on plates—grated

onions, please—
America’s game,
feed me.

Little Car

Your car drove alone in the dark on the drag and all I could see was the flat black of it—some fool tossing matches out the window—your bumper bright liquid at night, breezing to the triangled horizon. Made of milk from stars and headlights, I am the lit wind scribbling your car, the match marring the ground—a burned underpinning—

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Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy won Second Prize in Prick of the Spindle’s 2014 Poetry Open and her work appears in The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, South Dakota Review, Blackbird, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.