M. Nasorri Pavone
M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, DMQ Review, Cura, Rise Up Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Chaparral, Poemeleon, Wild Goose Review, The Citron Review and elsewhere. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart Prize.
The Mimicking Artifact
Words can make a deeper scar than
silence can heal. — Author Unknown
If there is a motive behind every
blank face, it’s a mystery, a guessing
game like what my mother stuffed
in the lock box of her thought, my shock
the day I unfolded the pages she’d written
that I folded back up as if I hadn’t —
the raw burn linger of an adjective
in her handwriting, a pronouncement,
a summation, a lie. (But is it a lie if
I believe it?) And why this one, why any
or all the lies I’m learning were hers,
but to dismantle with: first me then
us, the familial bond barely holding
by a threat. Beneath our feet, the floor,
a pipe was found that leaked unchecked
until mold erupted, pervaded — our
home that came to smell like death
with the dying still breathing in it,
with the shades drawn as if outside
were the danger, not this world within.
He So Loved His Butterfly
He’s pinned, has pinned her memory
like a butterfly to his grief.
He marvels at her iridescence.
I marvel at his wonder. As he speaks
he pins and re-pins her through
the heart — his, hers, pinning
and re-pinning, slowly, stopping
along the way, not the way I can
honor her, not more self-puncture.
As of course we see so
differently: he loved so the butterfly
that hugged us like a spider.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 