» Kate Falvey

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Kate Falvey

Kate Falvey's work has appeared in a number of print and online magazines, including Memoir(and), Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Hoboeye, Umbrella, CRIT, Inscribed, Hearing Voices, OVS, Literary Mama, Women Writers, The Mom Egg, the Aroostook Review, Shot Glass Journal and is forthcoming in Italian Americana. She is on the editorial board of the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center's Bellevue Literary Review and is editor in chief of the 2 Bridges Review. She teaches at New York City College of Technology/CUNY and lives with her daughter in Long Beach, New York.

Spitting Image

Fractured, this image of a swan:

early morning, early June,

a slow sun ruffling the clouds

where they tend to their nest of storms.

Egrets watch, aloof familiars, from

the blighted coven of skeletal cedar

and red maple, dead, still reaching,

intricate with power.

And the cygnets rake coils in the green

stillness of the marsh, their mothers prodding

pondweed and stonewort, harrying the tadpoles.

There is a scrim of birch and alder, and more

herons skimming for snakes and fishing-spiders

as light curls and dabs haphazardly.

Lured by the hazy peace, I blunder

from my clumsy blind and venture

to a translucent verge, too flimsy to bar

my love-sick gazing.

An inch too far and I am beset by

an eruption of wing and hissing.

The egrets don’t lift a feather to save me.

Slipping Down the Mud Bank

The spot where the child’s high chair

was up-ended

was bright with ferns and creepers,

wisteria and jewelweed wanton in

a mossy undertow

of run-off from the vague peril of

the listing, storm-addled road.

A slow mist clung like stifled thought

and shaped elfish hints of fear

which I subdued while reaching for

a cloudy-seeming rung as if the chair

were root or reed and would provide

a hand-hold or a stair as the creek bank

dissolved into a sodden, undulating lair.

There was a strange animation in the

chipped red of the high chair’s tray,

a ruddy evanescent glow of memory,

perhaps, or wooden dread,

a flash of muted color fixed

inside the diffuse, muddled grey

of drizzle, clay, and sand. I took

a stand and melded into mud,

knee and ankle splayed, distended,

the sudden swell more shocking than

predicament or pain. How long

I lay and shivered before shifting, rocking

a hair’s-breadth turn from break to bruise,

I still can’t say, but then, I spied

emerging from the startled ooze,

a silver baby rattle, blackened,

swaddled in bedraggled curls

of goldenrod and bracken.

When lifted free and scraped,

this age-clenched random find exposed

my own initials etched

in murky swirls on the twisted handle.

Arms outstretched, I grabbled, rose,

shaken, shaking, to somewhat higher ground.

My proof escaped as I ascended,

rattling down the slippery slope

to where some day, no doubt,

some other wanderer will unearth it

when she stumbles.

“But whose initials will be found?”

I vaguely wondered, hoped,

pushing through veils of fog

into the jolt of a clear and sudden

play of light.

Sister Moon

I could put you to rights if

you had half a mind.

What I’d tell you is this:

your illness has it right;

nothing is starlit, nothing is over,

nothing is sacred, everything

is scarred.

You insist on your right

to a past of snares and peril,

eyes without mercy, thickets

of giddy abandonments and

relentless disregard,

boggy distensions where only a small shoe

lies crumpled on the verge.

Your vision is complete.

The same images flicker chronically;

the pain mechanical and prescribed.

You’ve never realized it was you

who told all those ghastly lies.

Lucky Stiff

Cautious, she is, at thirteen,

visiting the Christmas city from the sticks.

She’s heard of tricks the monsters in the dark

are wont to play, scenting for young blood in the

thickets of the Park. She’s smart, but she’s

deliberately afraid.

She’s heard about the killings and the stalkings and

the gangs, the women turned to ashes in their glares.

They mark you unawares, then mutate into vicious

feral things. They catch your shyness in their eyes,

then spring.

Tricked out in its mesmerizing glow, the greens

and silvers smearing filmy ribbons in the snow,

the city sings

of winter work and want, wealth, and wry imaginings,

its complications muted in the gold

and dingy red tinged drifts,

the heft of gifts sparkling, crisply earnest, in

the high-strung shopping bags. She

has on her proud glad-rags, her thin-soled sling-back shoes,

like a coy suburban match-girl in the chips. Of course, she slips

into a frosty puddle of a cashmered gent, who drops his

briefcase, guard, and all pretence. Boozily roused

and absurdly unamused, he spits

something unholy then flips

this innocent the bird. Or maybe I misheard?

Or rashly misconstrued?

Before I, huffy Auntie Mame, can swing

to ineffectual defense, he murmurs season’s greetings

and slips into the huddling unreason of the street.

The charming flurry in the lamplight, heckled

by crass, impatient winds,

winds which, wilding, push

us indoors where spills of safe, spectacular

year-round lights dance, dazzling, over dancers –

whose nightly peril is latent in mistiming or missteps.

She

is frozen and forlorn, worrying her premonition:

we’ll have to pass the Park again,

there may well be thugs galore in store.

I tell her during intermission

that though this is a hungry, brutish world,

the brutes are far between and mostly dormant,

mostly tame.

A million passersby will pass the Park a million times,

will keep their purses, plans, and lives.

The bad that happens mostly doesn’t.

Self-satisfied, I think I’ve squared away her fear.

But when we tour the night again, she lags, sits

stiffly by the frozen fountain, demands

a taxi for a present.

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