Anne Marie Grgich, Victoria Spires, Katarina Pavičić-Ivelja

AOIFE, METAMORPHIC

Inspired by the legend of the Children of Lir

Victoria Spires

Have you ever loved, so hard as this? Like rushing

Water, set to alkaline, in scales and flakes of schist that

Crust your eyes with silvered lime; like plunging, heart-

First, through the rotted stonewort from the lough, the sulfur

Shock that grips about the lungs, and will not stop? You will

Understand - I was patient as a dart. You will understand -

I watched Aoibh tie the binds of birth, four times around

His winding forearms, that I longed to thread to mine.

At the fourth attempt, she died, and there I built my crannog,

On the shifting shallows of a shrine, hefting salt-hewn

Gneiss to fill the hollow of her hearth, tending, tending, to the

Fire that would not start, but sputtered, green as sin. I should have

Seen her ashy cast of grave wax on their skin - a mother’s rub

Of fat to ward away the thieving night, to hold her in. Yet

I had him, or the shadow of him, and these half-wrought

Stones were worth defending. I could not contend

With being fifth - could not fold my wings around a kin

I did not bear, and who would wish me gone. I wished them

Gone, a fretful song I sung into a spell. I wished them

Gone, and could not tell if it was hap or magic, took us

To the lake that day, May’s esters hung about their freshly

Lathered orchid crowns, bent together in small conspiracies

Of play. I meant to lay them on the bank, fledgling

Feathers tucked away beneath their quietened forms. Instead

I watched them, drawn to water's foliated yawn and took my

Cue in how they swum; pale flashes of their forms beneath

The surface caught my eye - their idle limbs saponified to

Sleekness, so it seemed they flew instead of hung, suspended

In a fluid tread. At once, my thoughts became a gauntlet,

Flung so I could not return from them, but felt them climb,

Ungloved and awful - the tight, hot smile of desperation

Urged them on, whispered sentences unfurling ribboned

Seas of wrong. Have you ever pressed a love to life, like

Rock, ground forth from out the pit of pity at your molten

Core? Wait six hundred years, three hundred more and tell

Me, does it ever cease, this crush of need that drowns the

Dead? And when the endless telling’s done, look West, to

Inishglora, where the swans are thought to swoop and sing amidst

The machair beds, the sallow hues of sorrow ringing in the sky,

Like plumy tresses stripped too soon, from unsuspecting heads.

MY GRANDFATHER AND I PLAY BRISCOLA SOMETIMES   

Katarina Pavičić-Ivelja                                                                               

My grandfather and I play briscola sometimes

when I am a child and his voice is made of starlight

that speaks the likeness of the ace and the three

of spade and denari.

We play and play and play

with the weathered cards from his ancient deck,

like we did when his words were born of flesh,

in the childhood living room of my dreamscape.

It’s a numbers game, he speaks, oh curious child,

and in our fictive home that isn’t, we celebrate

the digit string plaited by the pale, paper hands

of the knave, knight and king.

Twenty-one – the last digits of the year of his birth

Twenty-one – the months in a concentration camp

Twenty-one – the apartment number of his youth

We pluck and pluck the cards out of the deck

until there are none left

but the ace of spade and the three of denari –

They add up to twenty-one, too.

Briscola – an Italian card game consisting of forty cards, divided into four suits: coins

(Italian: Denari), swords (Spade), cups (Coppe) and batons (Bastoni).

First published in Opal Age Tribune