In that wee hour when the cats go mad
and carom around the house, a crash.
Dad’s WWII picture, where he’s pretty
as a girl in drag, unhurt, and Aunt Bea
and Klari with me in California, but on the floor,
handle broken, Aunt Vera’s cup.
It lived on the shelf beside the sink
with Mom’s single houseplant, ivy,
twining round. They kept it, like all
Vera’s pots, intact for 60-odd years.
In my careless wake, this cherished cup,
two marriages, and the sky-blue bowl,
Vera’s wedding gift, I gave away
to the single mom who rented our house
when we took off around the world
because she said, It looks like heaven.
Vera herself—who looked like Dad in drag,
as I do now, with our Hungarian jowls
and long schnozzes—though we were never close,
the night she died, visited me. On a motorcycle
in a leather miniskirt and orange lipstick
she kissed me on the mouth. When I woke, she
was gone. Could I ship this cup to Japan?
Surely someone closer knows how
to mend precious pottery with gold
to make it even more exquisite—
the lost bowl shining with all the shades
of heaven. I balance the three pieces
of the broken arch in place with a spell,
and Vera, who loved opera
and throwing pots, I conjure, with the perfect
bowl she made me that I couldn’t keep.
Barbara Ungar’s fifth book, Save Our Ship, won the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019. It won an IBPA Ben Franklin award and was a Distinguished Favorite of the IPA. A chapbook, EDGE (named for the EDGE lists of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species), has just arrived from Ethel Press. Prior books include Immortal Medusa, named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015; Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life; and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize and a silver Independent Publishers Book Award. A professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, she lives in Saratoga Springs. www.barbaraungar.net