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Write On Magazine's Featured Poet

Magi Schwartz

Vice President
Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation

Refusal to Forgive

by Magi Schwartz

Would I know you,
with green whisperings for hair,
cyber-space eyes, your bones,
white remains of obligation?
Do you still wear our father's face?

I have become Mother
with corseted morals and hair dyed mink.
My blue eyes turned brown like yours,
from shoveling the pungent refuse
left by your husbands's dirty dealings.

How will I find you?
The family name plate is gone
from our seats in the synagogue.
Your locker at the country club
has been removed. The city folded your name
into an origami bird and burned it.
Generations of community leadership
and respect went up in smoke.

Where can you seek me?
I will be waiting by the sea,
wearing a hair shirt of grief and guilt.
Finding me will be a slow, hot secret,
like a snail trailing a crack.
You will have to risk pain,
grind burning sand into the bottoms
of your callused feet.

We'll meet in a barbed wire embrace,
circling one another like crabs,
pincers of envy and greed
snapping blue with Maryland.

Curses will fall like butterflies from your lips.
Praise will fall like anvils from my mouth.
Nothing will be resolved.



Summer Fruit

by Magi Schwartz


Remember
your fondness for green gage plums?
The tart skin your teeth tore back,
exposing juicy sweet meat;
the taste of women running down your chin.

Sugar galloped in veins, a wild beast,
giving the same testosterone high
as when you ran the bulls at Pamploma.

Pulp dissolved in your mouth.
You digested me only a short while ago,
like Greenland's growing season.

I remember the greed and passion
with which you devoured fruit,
handfuls of cherries, soft rubies,
potent in their lushness.
You caressed and licked the slick,
cool, flesh of peaches, the
teasing pinch you gave apricots.

Then, the knife that balanced
life on its sharp blade
peeled me off in a single spiral
of apple skin. Four seeds
and a crumpled napkin of promises
remain in the blue cracked bowl.


Magi Schwartz is a poet and a lover of art,
and currently resides on Florida's beautiful Atlantic Coast.
She is vice-president of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation, co-poet laureate of the City of Hollywood, and a staff member of the Suncoast Writers' Conference at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg campus.

Magi conducts an interactive workshop
in both the public and private sectors of the community called IMAGINE THAT! Her latest published works have appeared in Libido, Slant, and Kalliope.

 

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