The Organ Grinder
After Stillness
The Organ Grinder
“Extortion to keep quiet,” the side note says,
the monkey balanced, birdlike,
on epauletted shoulder.
The organ has a grate like the front
of a nineteen-fifties Cadillac
and now I see the error—
……braille nubs of the music box
……lulling the child to sleep
The song’s a dirge,
the monkey’s weak with fleas.
A child, feeling blindly
for the edges of the world,
I grasped upon my father’s sausage-making
……(wine, friends, football)
The recipe: shoulder, liver, a bit of cheese.
The source: A piglet down the street,
…..weaned and grown.
I watched him suckle,
watched the plow of ears
and blindness of the young—
fat, hairless, skin the color of my own.
After the first scare
it gets easier to dine on flesh,
……digesting as the earth
……digests itself: meat to dirt.
And so I imagined the organ grinder—
input of liver and heart, music the product,
like sausage, to be savored as life
But years, it seems, fold
……like an accordion—
now I call it human
……the dirge:
creased cheek, the skin’s the first to go.
Father in his armchair
smoke suspended in the waiting air.
A few cells grind this body’s
……meat, their canon
the athlete’s trope: fight
Of all I’ll remember, this:
A 10th street vendor’s counter
and dad gulping tripe
after the first scare
……slow down, I tell him,
……its feathered edges
ghostlike in the blood-greased
meat sauce of the market
After Stillness
The desert here is due
an earthquake: swarm
or stick-slip surely, stored from
shear and richness of kinetic
earthweight—tensely brittle, visible
almost in the way acacias
……clutch the earth.
But the body’s first response
to trauma is swelling,
cushion of plasma and
hemoglobin, stone’s opposite.
Gummed lashes from a night of tears.
The error is not place,
but scale.
The mystery:
……that we still build,
sensing as acacias sense
the sticking rock under the homes,
the slip that’s long past due.
Lia Mastropolo is an aspiring science writer and graduate student living in Philadelphia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Pindeldyboz, Peaks & Valleys, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Home Education Magazine.
