Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Vermeer's Woman Standing on a Sidewalk With Cancer

This morning, when the woman in the red headscarf turns, 
Under her bare brows two translucent stones take in her
   straggling son.
Even here, on the steps of the school where she 
drops him off each day our eyes drop,
We know what to say, and say nothing.
I don't know whether she is holding back that advancing dark
or if she has given up 
or if she never did say I am lost,
I am lost
Only the way she adjusts her son's backpack on his shoulders,
with her swan smile
As if she were steadying his boat 
along the streaming sidewalk
with the secret wing of her finger tugging at the strap.
She has known something, or still does:
and far from anyplace she reaches to
where she has already dreamed him.

Guanacito

1.
The boy on the stoop balanced the coins on his knees before picking them up and rolling them off the step. There were more than three gold zlatnycks and if they rolled on their sides they could make it to the bottom that way though mostly they fell flat, shiny bellies round and hard on the grass. 

2. 
This happened then, in that backlit way.

3. 
He leaned forward careful not to tumble down the steps and picked up the ones that lay closest. Then he rolled them down again, some on their sides like wheels, 
some stopped flat like suns 

4.
You have not said everything. That way I will remember

5. 
The boots came and then legs and then the stick; 
the stick came down hard upon his head 
and they took the last coin from his hand.

6.
You say it in Spanish, this Russian story. 
You say "patio," "monedas" and "hermano, con rulos rubios." 
Sometimes you say he was taken by a gitano who fell in love
with the soft light of his hair 

7.
In Tarashche he was neither the first nor the last 
but in the stillness of the yard even the cock seemed rooted 
    to its dark patch of earth. 
The hens gathered in the shade beneath the blackberries. 

8.
Little murder, how you unfurl.

9.
Other times you admit "Cossacks."  The gitano's eyes, so full of valleys, could never want such yellow rain 

10.
He looked asleep on the stoop but his hair was slowly darkening, 
like dye coming through wool.

11.
The Cossacks in Buenos Aires had a different name.
Sometimes they were called "caudillos," sometimes "el ejercito." 
But the gitano children were the same, 
the way they stared, and you were the same
and you understood that everything was the same

12.
what you do not say: even in the darkness I see your damp hair. 
How could I not have known?

13. 
The Dniepr battered the trees bent into its midst as it rushed abundantly towards Kiev. 
Pale leaves clung lightly to their thin branches 
above the leafmold. 
The water whirled, 
and in the drone of the river 
the zlatnyck made a straight path for the bottom, 
where it disappeared like a stone.

14.
"My brother," you say, amazed.

15.
"My brother," you said, 
while absence spread everywhere like the sky 

East Beach, 1974

Narrow stretches of sand 
strewn with dark rockweed and glittering jingle shells
Divided the red mag-wheeled cars 
from the shifting green sea.
Globular jellyfish cruised the shallows, 
Flattened against the wet sand by tumbling whitecaps.
Bluefish ambushed minnows, 
who flew through the water's surface in the beaks of terns.

As the tinkling white truck pulled up to the seawall
From the boulders of the jetty we scrambled 
for the dreamsicles and hotballs 
And cold cokes the ice cream man kept by cocaine in eight-balls 
Tucked into push-up pops. 

The wind heaved past dunes and leveled umbrellas.
Radios scraped and wailed. Frisbees sailed
Periwinkles sucked algae in scummy pools 
While families picnicked near mounds of tide-crushed
   ladyslippers.

On the Fourth of July, 
As comb jellies glowed green in the falling tide
Shocked rock gulls 
accompanied the rise and fall of the fireworks, 
Gray paratroopers ejecting into a hailstorm of blue and red. 
We sat on the tailgate of our neighbor's white station wagon 
And shivered in the wet ocean air.
We hugged our knees, 
and ate strawberry pop-tarts under the booming sky

October

After the sun has turned away again
and the leaves have flown from the trees
after the monarchs
after the birds
after the clouds have drawn a sheet across the sky
and the days have flown like leaves from the trees
the days raked into mounds on the iron ground
the mounds of days on fire
their smoke raking the brown sky
after the last dark apples have dropped
and the pebbles are laid upon the stone
and the thousand sounds of your voice are inverted into rain
when the maze of bright parrots
let their browning feathers drift against my face
when here is after, when you are before
then the hours will begin to softly snow.

Marine Biologist

In the dim blue green midwater red appears black.
None notice the pink tail of dawn. None wish the skipping disc
   of moon
would dip deeper.  Or that its sunken stone would glow among
   the lampfish. 

In the shifting fields of black foam
the spilled map of stars wriggles with krill.
Beneath the surface 
silvered children watch the light slowly drown. 
In their blurred world stasis sways; the hot stars are softened
   blossoms.

Your lungs must thrill with the proximity of that old source- 
They mimic its breathing, eroding bone with their tidal pull. 
But beneath its unguarded surface how they want, 
borrowed air staling in two pink rooms 
oxygen cresting throat high with those insistent hooves, 
with that familiar noise.

Iris Alkalay was born in Afula, Israel, in 1963 and emigrated to the United States in 1965. Her father was Bulgarian born, of Turkish and Bulgarian parents; her mother was Argentinian born, of Ukrainian parents. Alkalay graduated from Brandeis University in 1985 and from Suffolk University Law School in 1988. She is a flutist and for many years played with various orchestras and chamber groups. Her first job as a lawyer was with Professor Stephen Hicks working on the Sixth Edition of Black's Law Dictionary. She worked as a criminal defense lawyer for several years and then concentrated her practice on criminal appeals. She occasionally works as a Spanish translator. 
Alkalay has taken a decade long leave from the practice of law to raise her two sons. Her poetry has appeared in Free Verse and 2River View. She resides near Boston.
"October" first appeared in Free Verse. "Marine Biologist" was first published in 2River View.