CHARLES FELDSTEIN has won numerous poetry awards, including first place five times at the Florida First Coast Writers' Festival. In 2007, his poem “Maddie Clifton, 1990-1998” was anthologized in the Eighth Edition of The Bedford Introduction to Literature. His poems and short stories appear in a number of publications, including Poet Lore, The Baltimore Review, The Georgia State University Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Kalliope, State Street Review, The Worcester Review and Signet. He earned his Ph.D. at Penn State University. For more than twenty years, he has been Professor of English and Literature at Florida Community College at Jacksonville and was Department Chairman at FCCJ’s South Campus. |
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CHARLES FELDSTEIN
Gravity
In the photograph,
my father is about twenty-three,
kneeling in the white sand of some beach.
....... He’s handsome,
like my middle brother,
and surrounded by a quorum of
four young women.
I gently lift the photograph,
stiff with age,
from the scrapbook
....... and with scissors
rearrange my father’s past.
I snip at the woman on his right,
her arm hooked inside his.
She’s hard to get at,
wedged between my father
and the woman on her right,
....... the one with large breasts ready
to tumble from her bathing suit,
her mouth open,
turned to his open mouth.
The woman with large breasts
drops, like the other shoe,
along with the woman hooked arm in arm with my father.
....... The third woman, the one on my father’s immediate left, is bending over,
hands on her knees.
She’s looking directly into the camera,
eyes black and turbulent.
Her hair is black, too,
scattered like
strips of burned paper.
....... Almost certainly my father ran his sandy fingers through that hair.
Made promises he didn’t keep.
I imagine her giving birth to me,
the doctor holding me up, handing me to her.
I see the eyes,
scream till my lungs shrivel into two small balloons,
feel the weight of her hands on my back, the weight of a mistake.
....... I come out of my daze with a jolt,
cut around the eyes first,
then snip away the rest of her.
Cut up, she resembles a tiny tree falling.
The woman remaining squints into the sun and stands
a little back of the others,
as if uncertain of her place in the picture,
....... or whether she belongs at all.
She’s about twenty and so delicate
she seems the absence of someone, someone
about to perish in the painful light.
I stare into this wisp of a woman,
and slip the photograph of my father and her into the scrapbook.
She won’t perish on the beach.
....... She’ll marry my father,
bear him four children,
and, always standing in the background,
unseen like gravity, she’ll hold our world together.
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