Read More: A Q&A with Rafaella Del Bourgo
Just Before Dawn
(for my husband)
Each morning we wake one day older
and still in love.
With my face against your chest,
I hear red time, its beat steady and strong.
Honolulu, 1986.
As you pulled yourself up into the dinghy,
the flesh on your thigh tore against an exposed nail;
blood washed back to the sea.
Now I trace the raised line of your scar with my finger
as you reach to turn on the bedside light.
Please don’t touch that lamp.
Fold me again into the warm cage of your ribs.
I know you.
I can see you in this darkness.
Sleep
She has been sitting by his bedside
for three days,
staring at lights reflecting like stars
on the metal tray bearing
his cup of apple juice.
Friends and relatives, the nurses,
have said she must eat,
and bring ham sandwiches
and iced tea,
but she is so full of love and grief
she says, “I have no room,”
even though the slow spinning of the earth
seems to make her dizzy.
She holds one of his T-shirts to her chest, to her face,
breathing in the familiar scent of his body.
She imagines that he sits up
and raises his arms in the air like a child.
She would slide the T-shirt over his bald head,
careful not to catch his ears,
then ease the right arm into a sleeve,
and the left,
pulling the shirt slowly down his back,
counting the knobs of his spine,
and then over his belly.
She remembers how that belly used to fit curved
into the small of her back as they lay in bed
and she waited for him to drift off,
waited to hear his breath
become rhythmic and slow.
Just for a moment,
she rests her head on his shoulder.
He stirs and lays his hand
on her hand and says,
“It’s OK to sleep.”
Ship
Camel ride from the little beach resort,
south-east of Karachi.
She’s feverish with malaria,
sailing through the desert in heavy seas. […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
Spring
On this overcast morning, late April,
pansies and snapdragons are drunk on dew,
their faces and mouths
beaded with drops of silver.
And, calling from above,
a chevron of geese
disappears into the mist. […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
Rafaella Del Bourgo’s writing has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, Oberon, Nimrod, and The Bitter Oleander. She has won many awards including the League of Minnesota Poets Prize, the Grandmother Earth Poetry Award, the Paumonak Poetry Award, the Northern Colorado Writers first prize for poetry, and the New Millennium Prize for Poetry. She won the Mudfish Poetry Prize and was nominated for the third time for a Pushcart Prize. Her first full length poetry collection I Am Not Kissing You was published by Small Poetry Press. Her chapbook Inexplicable Business: Poems Domestic and Wild was published by Finishing Line Press. She won the Terry J. Cox Award for her full-length poetry manuscript which will be released by Regal House August 12, 2025. And finally, she just won the 2025 Allen Ginsberg Award for her poem, “Nightgown, 1960.” She lives in Berkeley with her husband.
Read More: A Q&A with Rafaella Del Bourgo