417 Sunset Avenue
Your modest clapboards
and white trim, a two-seat porch
from which to love your delicate
lemon tree – for you I dreamed to be
at my pinnacle and now you’re unable
to overlook my lapse. I missed
your dismantling but not the shock
of the flat dirt lot I came upon in your
absence. You weren’t enough to sate
anyone needing to be sated.
If prisoners can be set free
let me call every tree that stalls
progress and a sky blue bungalow
slated for demo, the prisoners they are,
and let me release them intact.
I will travel to the echoes of my loss,
to where what I love is permitted.
Those who smother the skyline plan
a tower of shadow, but for now your
mail box still left, stands at the gate,
unlatched, choked with trash.
Love Attack in a Coffee Shop
From his unlatched toolbox —
his cracked-open laptop — a man
types loudly, sighs, his gaze shifts
to the next table where a woman
cocoons with pen and paper.
She tries to write as he attempts
with his eyes to small-spear her
into his orbit, its devouring spin.
There’d be no keeping up
with his kind of hunger, she thinks.
She’d still be holding her fork
after he threw his napkin in.
M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, Harpur Palate, Rhino, DMQ Review, The Citron Review, Pirene’s Fountain and others. Anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), she’s been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart Prize.
Thin Air Magazine 