MiPOesias Magazine

David Petruzelli’s Everyone Coming Toward You, published in 2005, won the 4^th Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize for a first book of poetry. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Rattle and Sulphur River Review. A member of the expert committee of the Philatelic Foundation since 1997, he lives in Manhattan and walks to work.

The Bride’s Calligraphy

There was the time he thought he saw her walking
toward him on the street. And once or twice he caught
a glimpse of her across the subway tracks at 51st & Lex,
waiting for an uptown train. And once, very late,
the phone had rung, and half awake he simply listened,
and whoever was on the other end
had done the same, and for one long minute
neither spoke a word, and at last he said her name,
only now the spell was broken, the line went dead,
he couldn’t go back to sleep. But after that
he seldom spoke of her. There were no more sightings.
The telephone behaved. He began to visit friends again.
Then one night at dinner, it’s clear he has something
on his mind, and finally, almost reluctantly,
while everyone is waiting for dessert, he asks
What if a man kept finding postcards
in his mailbox? What if the postcards were hand-written,
the messages affectionate, if a little distant,
yet unmistakably the man’s late wife, the stamps
uncanceled (which happens), but by the third card
he knows they’re not just slipping past, someone’s
leaving them. So naturally the husband thinks
a mailman’s being bribed, or, maybe a second key
was cut in secret, only please explain he says,
please explain how each card caught her hand just so,
knew exactly what to say, and if the cards
are being left this way, then why the need for postage,
why behave like his sister on vacation, who in the end
forgets, and hands him what she meant to mail?
But now
his friends are looking at him, they’re smiling kindly;
they might even be relieved. They say,
What if this someone, this husband, who knows he’s lonely,
who doesn’t fully understand the story’s needs,
the way it wants to turn, go on without him if it has to,
what if he’s held accountable at last, and shown,
perhaps to his surprise, that all along he’s been
the one—the messages, the stamps whose presidents
look mortified but otherwise unharmed;
because isn’t that the only explanation
and not the afterlife—which, as everybody
knows by now, forbids letters, journals, cards

—anything in that lovely, otherworldly hand.

Accidental Portrait

Here was one more way to pass the time
until my mouth turned numb, an afternoon
my dentist proudly showed me photographs
his daughter took with her babysitter’s
camera—snapshots a 4-year-old had deemed
were keepers: portrait of ceiling, window,
someone’s painted toes, empty bowl with spoon,
a doll’s right half peeking from the frame
expectantly, television left dark
(but on the glass a dim reflection
of the sitter looking glum). And only
when I saw this face in one last picture—
A composition caught just right by luck,
as though it made it safe for her to smile,
that I started seeing you again:
too thin from drugs, too pale, your last name
out of focus, blue eyes to the rescue,
and then the other week, after years
without a word, or story to go with
the other stories, I heard they found you
lying two days in a Florida motel,
suitcase still unpacked, forehead opened
by a coffee table’s wicked corner.
“You’re always so quiet,” you used to say
with mock concern. And then, more gently,
“Do you want me to be quiet too?”