Three Poems by William Doreski
Stitch and Tooth
Objects manifest in snow. A car parks in a corner of my eye. A bear crosses the road, chuckling and snorting. You emerge from the forest with stich and tooth accomplished. I constructed you from the bones of a hundred nightmare lovers. Your revenge is to live poorly with ideas of Paris and Rome simplified and pooled around you. No sound can baffle the snowfall, not even the whisper of marsh parsing its spring manifesto. Even the bear hardly registers on the scale of cosmic frequencies. The parked car’s cooling engine ticks, in the calm of a lost dimension. Once upon a time we lived there with the winter stars dancing in a slur of winks and expressions basic to everything’s health.
A Lifetime of Grace
Forgive me for kissing you while your niece was being baptized in St. Mary Woolnoth, perched in the grayest part of the City. The motorcyclist roaring through the nave to spit on the altar distracted me. I turned to you as if to sunlight. You tasted like breakfast, your tongue entangled in mine. You exhaled a whiff of wintry Essex marshland. while the priest wielded his Book of Common Prayer to ensure a lifetime of grace for the child.
A Warp in Time
A man asks me to direct him to London in 1940. He wants to suffer the Blitz— the crash of thousand-pound bombs, sizzle of incendiaries, screams of people trapped in the rubble. He wants to be a fire warden, a civilian hero, and meet the king on common ground. I explain that he needs a warp in time, a leathery fold in the dark. He will have to enter naked and trust strangers to clothe him when he emerges in a street of broken facades. He wanders off to muddle himself in visions while I with my tattered eyesight try to keep both feet on the path.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.