Marcene Gandolfo – String Poet

It took two days to drive through the desert, a week before I began
to see green again. The first time I saw my son

he was five-years-old, sitting at my kitchen table, staring at cartooned faces
on a cereal box. He smiled

with a full set of milk teeth, said he knew I’d been waiting to see his
chestnut hair, his strong chin that favored my grandfather’s.

He cupped his hands around the fruit bowl then grazed his finger against
an apricot skin.

He never said why he wasn’t born like his sister who heaved breaths
on my belly, fluttered her eyes and twitched her lips

open as they sweetly cut the cord. But he slipped behind the burgundy
curtain, asked me to play hide-and-seek.

I turned around and told him that summer it took two days to drive through
the desert.

I turned back and opened the burgundy curtain, faced an empty
window, pressed my hands into frozen glass.

Marcene Gandolfo’s debut book, Angles of Departure (Cherry Grove Collections, February 2014), is a collection of poems that explore motherhood, grief, compassion and healing. Last year, the book was a finalist for the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize and the Patricia Bibby First Book Award and a semi-finalist for the Washington Prize. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals including Poet Lore, Bayou, DMQ Review, The Café Review and Paterson Literary Review. She has taught writing and literature at several northern California colleges and lives in Elk Grove, CA.