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Anthony Liccione
*Anthony Liccione
Fairport, New York
I have been writing poetry for 10 years. My poetry has appeared in: Melting Trees Review, Taj Mahal Review, Foliate Oak Online, HazMat Review,
Poetry Super Highway and many other publications. I graduated from Monroe Community College with a Associates in Liberal Arts and published my
first poem here in the student literary and arts journal Cabbages & Kings. It was here when I decided to change my studies to English. I transferred to St.
John Fisher College and completed my Bachelor's degree in English in 2001. While there I had (5) poems published in the student literary journal The
Angle. I live in Upstate New York, and am employed with Rochester Gas and Electric.
Balloons In Malawi
I heard of your hunger, how you cried with flies
sponging sweat on your distended wineskins.
Scores of children suppressed in a corner
of the world with open sores, wrinkles
fill shadows over dearth faces.
Your dejected firmament is my same blissful sky-
the sun that burns you drought is the same
pinwheel that brings me growth.
On my wide screen one evening, blown on PBS
air-timed about the time I sat at the dinner table-
staring at the camera lens as a classical symphony
shared the precious moment.
Landscapes of cactus and yellow-bark thorn trees
scattered across flatlands. With hair in a tress
a woman etches stone with charcoal along the road
to Gonaives, street beggars pull wooden handcarts
filled with bones of relatives- perhaps to suck the marrow
or offer up to half-eaten gods. Pregnant woman succumb
to barren mountains, with pails pitched of murky water.
All painted in gray dust.
I decided to sponsor a child named Anaya
eighteen dollars a month could pouch nsima.
Two letters and an updated photo each year,
she was the seed that burgeoned my life.
I remember as a child in school, the school
sending up notes in helium filled balloons,
hundreds arose for the famine of the world
we prayed as they vanished in the clouds.
You grew like a broomstick,
thinly capable to be swept away.
I received your letter, translated-
"Thank-you for help, I am in school.
My family needs to move closer to clinic
so my brother may medical."
Those balloons the sky swallowed,
I'm sure, have expanded buoyancy
and fell belly-swelled of anemia,
where Christ ascended as a balloon
bursting a thousand seeds of maize.
he command: feed my children.
Senesce
I heard you as breath
Late that night
Beside me,
As a broken dream
It cam e as yolk
Where a leg elongated
Satin skin sheet s un folding-
In soil
About thetimethe
Wind suffocated
Through the window.
Gutter Ball
The hurl of your hollow,
plosive tongue
from the crotch of hell-
a labyrinth flame arcing.
The perpendicularity of it
smooth and spherical,
carved with mosaic granite
rolling down a wood-crutch lane
like a missile towards its mark;
daggers to puncture its martyr
from your steel, moral lips.
I faced the warm breeze
before it turned hurricane
and shatter the windows
of my taciturn eyes,
shrewd to pass, countless
times I spilled milk and honey
to this curving, cursed ball.
Your unwieldy thoughts
in a overflow salad bowl,
can I blame it on resentment
or the blood of garlic and oil-
an Italian vinaigrette,
flowing through those veins and
lying on a bed tossed soul.
Lolling to strike my pins
the very parts of me,
down your red carpet lane-
where vanity wears a crown.
Dowels in guidance for devils
you floored self-worth,
hope, merits in triumph and
the dance that spins maybes.
As picking off a picket fence,
I lay in pieces of dead wood.
We shared a death
from the same womb
and a forgotten birth
into the jaws of hell,
how this catastrophe
uprooted your personhood.
A winning ticket in one hand
and the weight of a lost child
binding the other-
an engineer married you
under stress, from your tension
blood pressed high
of a pressured heart.
The belabor you string
are your sour apples
-a continual poodle
tight around its leash,
beneath a mewling shadow.
Where the gutter will catch,
return your ball of stone.