Two Poems by M.J. Iuppa

True North

 

What frightens you isn’t Ontario stretching out before you, calm as

a yawn, its taffeta ripple stippling the surface of morning’s grays, but

a fallen branch, the color of coal, posed like a withered arm on the sand,

waiting for you to pick it up and point it in the direction of traffic, where

soon you will merge with the day's reckless continuity.

 

               

Feast Day

 

The mulberry, ripe with berries, ousts
its horde of ransacking birds
into summer’s steamy air—
and, one by one, they return
to filch a few more.

From the porch, we watch wings
swell       & flash out of the shaken tree—
dissolving into the safety
of the wood’s emerald shadows.

Restless, I rise
& lean against the railing.
The day’s momentum quivers
in its feat of all or nothing—

I hold my breath, anticipating
the conference of birds returning
to settle this tree’s estate—
the berries they will divide
& cart       in spite of
petulant cries.

 

 

 

 

M. J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario.  Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among other publications.  Her most recent poetry chapbook is As the Crow Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008), and her second full-length collection is Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collections, 2010).  Between Worlds, a prose chapbook, was published by Foothills Publishing in May 2013.  She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.