(PROSE POETRY)
2 POEMS
JEFF SCHIFF
2 POEMS
JEFF SCHIFF
Flower Market
My wife is all uvular trill & mouthed translation at her mirror today dreading the Que van a llevar? What will you carry off? Stems Señora or blousy fronds? Or will you need buds that fist through your night? Iris are simple & sure and line all the stalls where gesture will suffice, but there are astromerias to buy & mottled violet & off-pink ranunculus and heliotropic authurium, all Latinate and polysyllabic and looming to thwart an easy bloom on any tongue.
My wife is all uvular trill & mouthed translation at her mirror today dreading the Que van a llevar? What will you carry off? Stems Señora or blousy fronds? Or will you need buds that fist through your night? Iris are simple & sure and line all the stalls where gesture will suffice, but there are astromerias to buy & mottled violet & off-pink ranunculus and heliotropic authurium, all Latinate and polysyllabic and looming to thwart an easy bloom on any tongue.
What it Takes to Shop in the Third World
It helps for sure that I’m no longer daunted by hayseed draftees balancing plates of sugared fritters and M16 carbines, standing beside Jehovah booths ringing the mezzanine or by crippled vendors sworn to uphold the unrelenting code of the Chiclet, that I’m easily compelled by baskets of colossal eggs, progeny of smudged science, & too many lonely nights in loam-floored huts, that I am a sucker for the hearts of anything pickled in gallons of carrot & onion slurry, that I have a thing for snouts lulled to singed sleep on tintop counters, and that I wonder what it’s like to bed a woman who vends fingerlings of glue or home-dipped matches or doles congealed mush from a head pot bending to those who offer correct change or a sympathetic nod.
It helps for sure that I’m no longer daunted by hayseed draftees balancing plates of sugared fritters and M16 carbines, standing beside Jehovah booths ringing the mezzanine or by crippled vendors sworn to uphold the unrelenting code of the Chiclet, that I’m easily compelled by baskets of colossal eggs, progeny of smudged science, & too many lonely nights in loam-floored huts, that I am a sucker for the hearts of anything pickled in gallons of carrot & onion slurry, that I have a thing for snouts lulled to singed sleep on tintop counters, and that I wonder what it’s like to bed a woman who vends fingerlings of glue or home-dipped matches or doles congealed mush from a head pot bending to those who offer correct change or a sympathetic nod.
In addition to That hum to go by (Mammoth books, 2012), Jeff Schiff is the author of Mixed Diction, Burro Heart, The Rats of Patzcuaro, The Homily of Infinitude, and Anywhere in this Country. His work has appeared internationally in more than a hundred publications, including The Ohio Review, Tampa Review, The Louisville Review, Chicago Review, and The Southwest Review. He is currently serving as the interim dean of the school of graduate studies at Columbia College Chicago, where he has been on faculty since 1987.
