October 2014
Domenic J. Scopa
djscopa@gmail.com
I am the 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. I am a student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I study Poetry and Translation. My poetry has been featured in Misfit Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Untitled with Passengers, Gravel, Crack the Spine, Stone Highway Review, Apeiron Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Literature Today.



House Fire


hectic pounding on my bedroom door
            clashing with the pointed
                        beat of windows bursting--
        
            pulling blankets off--
                                    looking out--

                       my neighbor’s house engulfed--
                                                flames scaling               
                                                            the suddenly flimsy roof--
                                                snapping lumber
fire engine lights bouncing
            down the block--
neighbors kneeled on lawn as if to heed
                        some holy proclamation
                                                from their burning home--

                                   
                                    their baby girl pretends
                                                to bottle-feed
                                                            her threadbare teddy --
                                                cotton stuffing spilling
                                                            from its crippled stumps--

She seems as though she

only wants to play.





Stoned


I’m skipping stones
across the scum.

There is a strong swell,
the water in a glossy darkness
like a shattered window pane
neither giving nor accepting
light. Rowboats rock.

            Always out and in
            of rehab
            or serving
            jail sentences,
            my uncle rang
            my tuneless doorbell
            only once
            in seven months.

Red sun
behind thunderheads
steadfast as infants
and addicts.

            “Why don’t you ever phone?”--
            with his arm averted
            as if to hide the track marks.
            “I never see you anymore,”
            his forehead sweaty
            and pale as quartz.  

Sand brands
its little coals
into my knees--

I hurl a stone…
listen for its plunge…

Toothless rat.

 
__________________________________________________________________




Akhmatova in 1922 
portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin




Lot’s Wife
by Anna Akhmatova   (1889 -1966)
translated from the Russian by Domenic J. Scopa

 
And Lot was trailing close behind the messenger,
Immense and bright before a mountain, black and large.
His wife’s heart loudly spoke—strong and strange:
“It’s not too late, you still can turn to face the purge

And see the crimson towers forged by native Sodom,
The square you sang in, courtyards where you danced,
The vacant windows of a tall, forgotten house
Where you bore children for your dearest husband."

A solitary glance—a sudden pang of crippling pain,
Her eyes no longer seeing anything at all--
Her body formed into a pillar of transparent salt--
And her swift feet rooted to the sprawling ground.

But who could mourn for this misguided woman?
Doesn’t she seem the most insignificant of losses?
Yet my heart will not forget the human,
The one who suffered death for one look back.





The Last Toast
by Anna Akhmatova  (1889 -1966) 
tranalated from the Russian by Domenic J. Scopa

I drink to our dilapidated house,
The evil in my life,
Our loneliness together--
To you I lift my glass--

To lying lips that have betrayed me,
To frigid, lifeless eyes,
The fact the world is grim and brutal,
And god, quite clearly, has forsaken us. 








©2014 Domenic J. Scopa