Hair pulls to the root
to the scalp with the nails
through the flesh
in the blood
to the bone…
Passion is rose scented rage.
—
BIO: Poet and writer, professor and Ph.D. student, Charles Bivona wears many hats. Luckily, he looks good in hats.
CONTACT: charlbiv@gmail.com
You see me crying, curled up in a ball on the floor. I want you to come to me. I want you to tell me I’m pathetic. I want you to look me in the eyes and lie to me. Tell me you don’t wish I was never born. Don’t lie. Admit it. You wish you could unmake me. Because if I don’t hear that, I won’t listen to you anymore. Because I understand. Because I know what you are feeling. Because I’ve always wanted to not exist, to vanish.
Dear _______:
There is no need to thank me for asking about your safety. I think of you often and hope you are doing well wherever you are.
I never got a chance to tell you how impressed I was with the paper you wrote on Tim O’Brien. I passed it around to colleagues and friends, but I never saw you again after you handed it in. It was a brilliant stroke to write a letter to Jimmy Cross from the perspective of a member of his platoon. Many people were very impressed.
I am telling you this because I want to encourage you to keep writing. Get a journal, write in a notebook, or email me. I think you have important things to say about this world. I hope you will continue to work on saying them as well as I know you are able to.
Please do keep in touch.
Yours Truly,
Professor Charles Bivona
Rutgers University
LOVE UNDERSTANDING
just the way
we used
to play
each other
so well
as if
our lives
were dancing
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
she told her
infant niece
in front of
her sister
that she smelled
like womb
After getting caught in the rain, you used the phrase “drip dry and look for rainbows.” And I saw, in a mind’s eye, flashes of you with a towel, running and drying your hair, those blues eyes aimed to the sky.
Thank you. You always makes me smile.
eyes on
My
self
but you live
huge
all
the Night
when
Doom Holds
will
see
more
believe
Nothing
…with you is like having a tiny cyclone burst through my door, threw me on the bed, focus ed in thrusts down hard on me, over and over, until you pushed all that energy in a deep throat sigh, one releasing animal roar, and then quivered, cried in my arms on the floor…
So, I keep trying to revise, to perfect, the ghost I will leave behind. There’s a tipping point coming—when the person I’m known as publicly, this narrated person I’m creating—that small part of me—will be the most real.
I sometimes fantasize myself as a post-modern, atheistic, old school biblical prophet, a poet who wants there to be a God, but knows there isn’t.
If you didn’t know that about me already, you do now. But no worries. There isn’t much that any of us do that’s unforgivable.
And then
she was
gone
I knew
from the silence
where she used
to smile
the pull in
dark spaces
dormant
relaxed
nurtured and
sleeping. I was
tamed
by her