Sample Poems by Carla Schwartz

In the Café

If I don’t read K’s email
while working in a café today,
then soft wind on my face.
If the note isn’t prefaced
by her declination of my invitation,
then alternator current.

The fireplace calls liar when I pass by,
the unlit sculpture slumped in its char.

Show us your heart
a beach stone.
Show us your smile
a coiled ribbon.

Love is a blouse of dismissed calls,
it flatters. What island are we from
that with just two of us
we don’t see each other?

A nanosecond is only as big
as a pencil. If the mouth
has no brain behind it,
then blueberries.

We have no reason
to leave, so we stay.
If K’s father isn’t in hospital,
monarch butterfly.

The fire sculpture is stacked, waiting for K.
And if tears, then mother-
K proposes bitter, and I say not bitter.
A bear trading a paper flower for a newspaper:
    raw honey
    clover honey
    orange blossom
If not my mother, then
wipe tears from the face of a woman
typing in a cafe.
If I call        then dead woodchuck.
    Show me the tissues.
Show me
    the tissues.

Withstanding the Heat

We all know how to put a dinner together.
At your house, it’s simple,
not having much choice of ingredients.
I choose the fine pasta over rice,
a no-brainer, really, in terms of time.
I gather the box of pasta, comfortable on its shelf,
angel hair, even faster, and bring it to counter.
This time, I use the big pot, not the 2-quart,
to add wiggle room for what needs to wiggle now,
and later.

I set the full pot on the back burner to boil,
while I work the sauce. Your spice cabinet, full, but dull,
offers rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil,
the large skillet for the sauce and frozen vegetables.
The garlic in the refrigerator is turning. A brown film.
I point out the sepia edges. You defend the slime.
Not used to garlic in stiff plastic, I stab
the rusted steel knife into the package, and it resists.

The knife cuts through the plastic to my thumb,
and enters my skin.
My shriek startles you into unwilling action.
Accidents don’t happen
in your house. The blood roses
bloom into the compress.
Your rescue: an insufficient band aid
and a child’s lesson in cutting.
Red splashes on sour garlic.
When I return to the kitchen,
you have turned off the stove,
as if to imply I would burn the dinner.
It was only water wanting to boil,
a big pot of it, and that takes time.

Into the pan with the pressed garlic,
I add the almond butter, which clings to the spoon,
and the soy, the sesame oil, and vinegar.
I need something
in the hot pepper department. More red taint
for the almond sauce. I slit the bag of vegetables,
timidly now, and add them in. Stir. Heat.
I strain the pasta back into its pot.
When I toss in the vegetables,
you can't see the red.

A History of Raspberries

Frances lived in a little house
between Route 9 and the Pike.
She had been there 40 years,
through 2 kids, grown and gone.
Husband, dead. Cigarette habit, dead.
But her plantings thrived.

She was thinning raspberries one year,
and offered me some.
I made a place for these
to compete with my wild blacks
that I could take or leave.

When I lived in Vermont, I planted raspberries
in front of the bathtub Mary.
I don’t know what the nuns next door
thought about that, but those berries were good.

It took three years before the first berries arrived
one October, just barely before the first frost.

In November, I put two soft plump ones
in a silver cardboard ring box
to bring to my mother, sick in hospital.

Her eyes lit on them as if they were holiday ornaments,
or truffles, or cherrystones on the half-shell.

Now, Frances is dead of lung cancer. Mom, leukemia.
I get a summer and fall crop of raspberries.
I had berries into December this year.

I still have the red-stained cardboard box.
Each bite, a sweet tart burst.
Frances. My mother. Bathtub Mary.

Figs in June

I used to say the only good reason to live in Florida
was fresh figs in June. I never told that to Frank.

Frank had a back yard pear tree.
The pears were spotted and misshapen.
He didn’t eat them, so I could have all
I wanted. The tree was taller than his house,
so I had to take the drops. That was O.K.
Those pears would be good for a pie.

There were also two fig trees at the side of his yard
close to mine. Fig trees are short
with mushroom crowns.
The figs are hard and green and bitter until they ripen,
when they turn soft and sweet.

Frank didn’t need no truck with the figs either.
But the birds, they was another story.
You might think the tree of knowledge was a fig.
Somehow the fig trees taught me outsmarting the birds.
They only gave for about one week in June.
I’d head out with my little green pint basket
and pick a day short of ripe.

Frank said, One time I climbed up on my roof with my b.b.
and shot a squirrel right off the tree.
I used to want the pears when my girls were young,
but the squirrels would eat ‘em all first.