Deborah Schwartz

Twyckenham Notes
Issue Fourteen
Winter 2021-22

Solar Eclipse

I love my own handwriting because it is exactly what I own.
My mother’s starvation, her own. 

In the night, I carry the old world in my head, while my mother 
slips past me holding lilies. She hates lilies and where is she going.

I want to go with her, to hold her hand while she walks the house’s long passes.

Thistles and potatoes; banished and splintered; hammers and bloodwort; a brick. 

Her beautiful flower of a face. Her nightgown. 

Toward the maple, full, over–full, she walks to find her town 
and its graveyard of rocks.

Her black hair unpinned. Her black hair unwinding.

Falling in Love With Nancy I Know We Will Never Have Children

Who is the night-bird of orange?

                          And who the cloud of weight with no substance?


And when did I have my last cigarette: at night, 

                          it must have been at night, 

                                       and alone.		
	
                                       *

             The river. 

                          The color orange that never ceases.

                                       The day uncontested as clouds.     

Less and less are the sounds my body makes swimming in the river.
 

                                       *

Garden flushed green with parsley.

             Green and orange. 					

                                                    Spirea.             White linen hush.

             Curtain placed over my thinking mind.

                                       *


Why does this knowledge appear out of nowhere.  

                          Couldn’t you come to me as light.

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ‘s poetry collection, A Girl Could Disappear Like This, was published in 2019 by Kattywompus Press, and her forthcoming book, Wind of the House, Voice of The Stream, While We Turn You Around and Around and Around: poems in chorus and four voices will be published in Fall, 2022 (Kattywompus Press). Her poetry, fiction, and essay have been published in various journals and anthologies including eclectica; Forklift, Oh; G.W. Review, Slippery Elm Review, and Lesbian Love Stories: an anthology. She is an Associate Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, MA.

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