A Poem by April Salzano

Close the Window

I am not cold, I am hungry,

but the high wind is not blowing anymore.

It is crawling toward me with the darkest sincerity.

I cannot look light in its face,

and it refuses to look at me, but the smell

of cotton hangs in the air and I am pretending

I know what it means to be poor

when all I can do is count my blessings

like raw soap shavings whittled off a bar.

They fall at my feet and I consider

in all honesty

licking them to know the taste of someone

else and bad language. A punishment.

When I can’t do anything else, I can do that.

And I can’t. Do anything else.

Except that.

 

 

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania and is working on her first (several) poetry collections and an autobiographical work on raising a child with Autsim. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspiration, Deadsnakes, The Rainbow Rose and other online and print journals and is forthcoming in Inclement, Poetry Quarterly and Bluestem.