Kimberly Nunes
“Like Cleopatra’s Barge”
&
“The Mornings Illuminated by Sunrise and Moonset Simultaneously”
Like Cleopatra’s Barge
She drifts in a golden pavilion.
It’s where she spends her days—
the bed, a burnished throne.
Lacey lamp, TV on, newspapers spread,
all those books by Brits
and Scots—her blood, the cat at her feet.
Her wig is off. She raises an arm
and skin drapes like a swath
of corduroy. O, I wish
I didn’t feel thrust back—
seeing on her back—raised patches
of greenish skin. I wish I didn’t fear
her need for bottled tears.
I’ve grown to adore
her smooth head, though, those few
remaining wisps.
And when she makes up
her face (as she must each day)—
black liner, taupe shadow, thick
Revlon lips a moist orange-pink, wig full
and red to raven—my mother
is movie-star beautiful. Here,
so long ago, she crouches
near a stream, knees to her chest,
dark fringe of her pageboy cut—
the sweater, hand-crocheted.
Her fingers reach to rest
on the Mary Jane straps
at her ankles. The riggish grin.
A crisp white slip framing
her white-cottoned crotch.
The Mornings Illuminated
by Sunrise and Moonset Simultaneously
Today, he shut the alarm at 1:46—
our plan to view the red eclipse
scrapped—there was
my cough, a fumbling with earplugs,
and then his hand—
at 5:00 a.m. he slipped from bed.
Like most mornings
when he stays over, except when
he sleeps in till six.
At these dawn hours, no sounds
from the neighbor’s saw,
no bird throng in treetops.
Only a silting, like the silence
of an ocean floor.
Back by eight, he brings tea
with a honeyed spoon,
tells me about the marine layer—
warm air on a cooling sea.
“Is that not fog?” I ask.
How it knitted a layer
to wrap the moon, still there,
and the morning sun, like two lamps
in a child’s fort.
Like nothing he’s seen,
the color, a silver and gold mix.
Is that not bronze?
And we’ve gone on
this way—his hand pressed
to my belly, his slipping away,
sometimes for weeks—
then returning, describing,
and my rebuttals—
for how long now—it’s hard to say.
Kimberly Nunes’ poems have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Light Press Anthology, California Quarterly, Caveat Lector, Evening Street Review, Mantis, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Madison Review, among many others. She sits on the board of Four Way Books in New York City and received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College.