Kitchen Visit
The purple carrot’s taste
does not live up to its exotic appearance.
Handsome is as handsome does,
is what my grandmother would’ve said
though likely not about a carrot.
Dead for forty years,
she arrives, this time in her blue
print dress with the large front pockets
that never served as pockets
though she always let me look inside.
Frost laces our front window
and a single moth blinks
like a human eye,
the pane of glass between us.
The purple carrot on the counter
cannot account for why my grandmother
appears, now as a moth on the window,
and later again as knitted sweaters
folded in my closet,
just the way she taught me,
first the arms towards the heart
and then the waist
folding up to the neck of sweater
like the impossible pose in yoga
she is holding for me now
as only a ghost can, and inhabiting
my pregnant daughter, herself
a yoga teacher.
I can sense her there,
looking out at me
from the womb where her first
great grandchild grows.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems appeared in New Ohio Review, On the Seawall, The Writer’s Almanac, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her two books, Talking Underwater and Second Skin were published by Wind Publications in 2007 and 2010. Galapagos Poems was published by Kattywompus Press in 2016. Her third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/Madhat Press in March, 2018. Echolocation was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Best Poetry Book for 2019 and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award.
Winter 2021