LindaAnn LoSchiavo, who recently won Wax Poetry & Art’s poetry contest, has been published in Ink & Letters, Measure, Mused, Switched-On Gutenberg, Windhover, as well as in other literary journals and numerous anthologies. Her chapbook “Conflicted Excitement” was just released by Red Wolf Editions.
The Milliner’s Late Night
Her millinery shop had windows bright
With fascinators for madame whose face
Needs artificial lace to help erase
Ten years and homburgs for suburbanites
Disguised as understated socialites.
She scanned the sawdust-trampled street in case
Her customer was late or had misplaced
The payment for this bretonne veiled in white.
Winds cold as fingers of an old cashier
Blew scraps through the boutique as beggars took
Their place. The organ grinder’s monkey held
His fez when coins appeared as sunset neared.
A lady, cloaked, knocked with a frantic look
As, in the distance, wedding steeples belled.
La Rue des Reves
All day I’m puppet-ized, hands sawing air,
Their talking plain as pain and used to strike
Till violet tedium of sunset’s sky
When gusts of melancholy lid my eyes.
My mind runs tapes of where I’d rather be,
Deletes a vast unusable past. Bed:
Your clean sheets generate sweet luxury,
Spread an eternity of wonders there
On home soil, dimming fierce red real-life blooms.
Love’s shuttered silence shifts; its centers can’t
Hold where dream’s silence is its lexicon.
They disappear, these imperfections, leave
No record how they felt, dragged day by day.
Embracing sleep — — my necessary angel — —
Connecting what’s affirmed from under, I’m
Out, walking lines between my heaven’s earth
As bedsprings bear the bother, this great weight.
Boccaccio and The Decameron
In air arranged by bees, the honied sting
Stuck to Boccaccio, made him scratch his life
And bleed it on a page, gold-leafed labor
Producing volumes: prose, winged verse, critiques.
With The Decameron, mortality
Realized it had to leave this B alone.
Like Calandrino — —third tale, the eighth day — —
“Mouth hunter” never would just disappear.
One hundred stories: Florentine dessert
Preserved by honey’s words uncombed to soothe
Plague-driven years. His other work expired,
Stung by unmanaged death, reputation
No richer for the weight of its sweet breadth.