Mary Petralia

Father Constructs a Tudor A metronome click-tock killed us softly in songs by our father— 1973, wet smell of wood truss triangles ramped together with spit nails, bruised fingers, good for construction. Sticky orange-grove-anthills run over by a hoary surrey in the yard, its smell like horse leather and damp hair, good for time travel. Cigar fumes like locust wings, plague-colored, under our feet a forest of garter snakes rope-thick, good for omens— inside his hidden forbidden music room, rheumy clarinet coalition squeals, Glenn Miller’s String of Pearls anti-crescendo roped into concrete-loop foundation, good for scabbed skin. Our tudor house is baked full of dead fish, sting bees in the half timber, his wood reeds tongued thin, the moss green Karmann Ghia parked under a dead navel tree, Roberta Flack on his radio. Grow grow me birthchrist, your deep plan your lineaments. cry cry the other line, the coffin the dogfog of this divorce— him was then, a close man of light light sky blue Paradise, godwant of the century. his name twists again against my body a canoe of one water, blue stones finished diagonally finally, intolerable this liminal headache of something. Love Poem For My Husband -Of Victor Jara’s “Estadio Chile” He remembers Jara’s smashed wrists, when he was young. Death in the Stadium, the broken moan song. People disappeared at night. Now he believes in tiny trolls that run along baseboards, sabotage water lines and light switches. Pero we don’t wonder how many we are, dos juntos. We are found in starry night space without silence, without screams. Mary is a semi-native of Central Florida, born in Brooklyn but transplanted to Florida at a very young age. She considers herself an “island girl” and attributes this fact to her father’s native Sicilian blood. She is currently enrolled in the MFA Program at the University of Central Florida, where she is a nominee for the 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project. Her poems have been published in deadbeats poetry blog. She can be contacted at mpetralia@knights.ucf.edu.