Convex Mirror
They wait outside the dining room—
platters teeming with roasted chicken,
kale, fruit—their only job to sate
their master’s hunger. They will never
hear their names spoken aloud in these
rooms, but they are clear: obey, kneel,
unequal, silence. They stand primed
for action the second the signals become visible,
reflected in the mirror’s polished surface—
a nod, a hand brushing against a lapel,
a tweaking of a collar. They shoulder
their load every day, bending to place
the feast in front of the guests. They know
what will happen if they resist. They’ve lived
on the periphery—all but invisible—like the mirror
bulging toward the light, showing their likeness,
though virtual and diminished.
My Day as a Joseph Cornell Box
A clock showing 6:18 AM—a little late for me, but I suppose I am still on Pacific time. An overall background pall of gray cloudiness. A bowl filled with melon cubes. Cantaloupe. Growing up we called them muskmelons. Today I learn that cantaloupe is a type of muskmelon and that the word has a French spelling because the name was adopted into English from the French. However, the Italians, my people, were the first to grow them at a papal estate near Rome. The town was named Cantalupo, which, if you wanted to translate it from Italian, would roughly break down as “singing wolf.” So, rather than having cubed melon in my Cornell day/box, it will have a singing wolf—or maybe a howling wolf. Next in my box will be a path through the woods—oak trees, wildflowers, boulders in the creek because no day of mine would be complete without all of that. A banjo could stand in for the bullfrogs croaking—you can’t really put an actual sound of a frog croaking into a box, so a banjo will have to do. I saw the most beautiful midnight-blue butterfly this morning. I have no idea what type it is but that doesn’t really matter. I will either add a butterfly or paint parts of my day/box the same midnight blue to capture the butterfly’s hue. A rabbit. A deer, or several deer. They are all over the place—eating everyone’s tomato plants and shrubs. But now it’s beginning to sound as though my day is spent in a forest with cute animals coming up to me, feeding from my hand. That would not be correct, so I will add a banana or an apple or a turkey sandwich to show I am somewhat normal. Those items for the box are easy enough to gather and display. But are the gathering and displaying enough? Even if they are meaningful to us? Because they will disappear one day. But how do you translate the rest of it into objects? The dread, for example, or the fears of growing old—and of too many people dying? What about the joy of realizing that someone cares about you, that you matter? Or being happy for no reason? Things you cannot even articulate. Do we need to translate them? Is that why we keep those thoughts to ourselves—to hold onto them? A moon in the corner of my day/box shows night is approaching.
Susan Bucci Mockler’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Maryland Literary Review, peachvelvet, Maximum Tilt, Pilgrimage Press, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, The Northern Virginia Review, Gargoyle, The Delmarva Review, The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Cortland Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Voices in Italian Americana, and several anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, Covenant (With) was published by Kelsay books in 2022. She teaches writing at Howard University in Washington, D.C.