Three Poems After Sappho

I
for the 2008 Phillies

Game Five, postponed twice by the rain, was starting

as I rode the train back from Delaware, trans-

fixed by you, deaf to my friend’s conversation,

caught in your two brown

eyes, bright as two bits of a broken bottle,

the finely turned planes of your close-cropped skull, your

neck that I can’t stop picturing all stamped with

kisses like postage.

Weeks before we met, I had seen you biking,

balancing a flower arrangement in one

hand—it made my heart beat in choriambic

meter for hours.

(Closet case that I am, my heart’s a can of

Coke that I drop, shaken, at strangers’ feet; when

it’s someone you know, there’s a chance you’ll have to

open it later.)

As I walked home, sore with the thought of you, the

streets went wild with shouts, firecrackers, klaxons

and then sirens: some were for joy, I’m sure, but

some were for danger.

II

Bittersweet beast Eros, you bitch, you caught me

slipping, got me sticky with sap, festooned me

up and down with fat pollen-yellow catkins

dangling like earrings.

Bradford pears bloom, filling the public highway

with their stank—just look at this mess. I leave a

smudge of yellow dust everywhere I sit. I've

lost all composure.

Look what you've done, Eros, you loosener of

thighs: she looks my way and my throat begins to

prickle, swells with itch; I break out in hives; my

eyes start to water;

I'm skunk cabbage, sweating a big wet spot through

March frost with my purple and awkward snout. Come

trample me back into the black earth with your

boot, pretty soldier.

III

I was born in April, although I know I

am no crocus; nevertheless I think I

know what one might feel like before it opens,

flower-parts gold as

yolk – or deeper, turmeric maybe. Like the

hidden stripe of yellow you painted down my

spine the other night with your thumb. I still can

feel it, a little.

Sweet/Nothing

My lit match, my spilt

milk, my spare change.

You're my tall dark and

disorderly—or, if I'm

stuck at the border, my

flora, my fauna, the

undeclared fruit in my

suitcase. My well, if it

ain't. My damned if you

do. My foot in the grave.

Or you're June, and the

young trombone player two

doors down is practicing

etudes with the windows

open, each note round as a

pear. My old head, my

sore heart, my last bone.

April Sonnet

This morning the magnolia lifts its fistful of petals,

chips off a pink china plate. Trash day. For you,

I'll come straight home, wave at the scrap metal

truck as he rattles past. By noon on the avenue,

they're hustling bootleg frankincense and myrrh,

pollen floats from the green mouth of every tree,

and the air is like your breathing when you stir

in sleep—you'll wake up and bury yourself in me

like a bee in a lily, your kisses blooming sudden

and purple as crocuses on my neck—Open all

the windows. No point trying to keep this hidden.

My heart is a toy rocket whistling in free fall,

trailing smoke; my heart's an open container and

you are walking the streets with it in your hand.

Sally O’Brien is a lapsed classicist who grew up in Connecticut, surrounded by Christmas-tree fields. She works as a public high school English teacher in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, and lives with her husband, young son, and nephew in the shadow of the Market-Frankford El. Her work has previously appeared in Apiary Magazine and Rattle's Poets Respond.