Sample Poems by Alissa Sammarco

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Things I Didn’t Write Down

Grandma telling stories as we washed dishes
while the men sat back, unbuckling belts,
putting red tipped matches to cigars.

I didn’t write down the names of all the cousins.
The one who fell into the hole dug for the foundation.
She was pregnant.

The name of the young mother who said,
“What a good baby, he never messes his diaper.”
Grandma called the doctor after unwrapping that child.

The day I read the article about brain injuries
and started crying in the lunchroom
was the day my grandmother had a stroke.

What did I write down that day?
Was my page blank or did it look like
a child’s self-portrait,

crayon colors in big round circles
crossing over and under, up and down?
Was it like that for her when she finally woke up?

Names and places still pressed into her mind.
I didn’t write down the stories she told me
on her walks through her memory graveyard.

I wrote lists of juice boxes and orange slices and soccer games,
folding them in four and stuffing them into corners.

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I Ask About the Beginning

If I write in your voice,
am I stealing the voices
of all our grandmothers?
The women who suffered
indignation
of being a woman.
Moving from Italy to New Jersey,
a steamship from Porto di Palermo
to Lady Liberty,
leaving footsteps in the vineyards
that disappear each spring,
not even a mark in the mud
to be immortalized like Lucy’s steps
along that ancient African shore.
Here the mountain reclaims everything
in great floods, mudslides down the slope,
a slim place for living,
a slim place for beginning.

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I Never Complained

My grandmother, in blue housecoat and curlers,
never left the kitchen until breakfast was done
and the men had returned to their
hammers and nails and ladders,
to their coils of rope and oiled tools,
tinkering with the engines
of Cadillacs and Chris-Crafts.

And I, a girl, was left behind
in the kitchen with all those things men forget
as soon as they walk out.

But when the laundry was dry,
sweet smell of lavender flakes,
Grandma cut the Pepperidge Farm cake,
rummaged in her bag for a pink sweet-n-low,
and poured us a half-a-cup of coffee.

Sitting at the kitchen table,
she had not a hair out of place.

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Nothing is Safe

chastity
sobriety
the dreams
that play
inside
of eyelids

love
wants to be peace
but it is not peace

and nothing is safe
gold rings
songs children sing
all our treasures
tucked away