Andrena Zawinski is author of Traveling in Reflected Light, a poetry collection published by Pig Iron Press as a Kenneth Patchen competition winner. Zawinski’s individual poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal of Fiction and Poetry, Gulf Coast, Paterson Literary Review, Talking River Review, Quarterly West and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared online at PoetryMagazine.com, Eidetic Annals, Zuzu’s Petals, Rio and at other sites.

Zawinski has won awards for poetry of social concern, for free verse, for researched based non-fiction, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pittsburgh Magazine named her One to Watch in Literature in their inaugural Excellence in the Arts Awards, and the Associated Writing Program featured her in their Pittsburgh conference as An Up and Coming Writer.

Zawinski is currently working free-lance, having recently put behind her a career in public school system teaching. She continues to act as a teacher-consultant for the W. PA Writing Project, an artist-in- education for the PA Council on the Arts, and a poet-in-person for the
International Poetry Forum.

WE REMEMBER SKINNING CHICKEN

We are skinning chicken in my mother's kitchen,
sticky wet in July. We'll make soup from this,
she says, wishing for rain. The blade flashes
along the pale slick of breast, rends
the first fat in a stream of blood down my arm.
That will be a scar, she says, like mine, the one
I got from the kerosene lantern on the mining hat,
reading when candles were dear & electric was out.

Skin slips through my fingers. I tell her
I remember things: a feather ticked bed, her warmth
around me in winter under the tar paper roof
in the shingled shack. She says she can't remember
but then she remembers her father, packing
his lunch bucket,water bottle on the bottom, fresh
slaughtered smoked sausage sandwiched
in warm baked bread at the top. She remembers
primping for a Jennerstown boy, rubbing
the smell of smoke & onion away with salt
when there wasn't enough milk for the babies. She says
Papa rode the buggy on the rail down to the hole. He bit
the life out of land in Windber's #40, fed pig gristle
to rats who ran warnings when oxygen thinned
before sirens called a cave-in.


Skinny sinews slide through baubles of grease. I cut
my slippery hand again, ask her about the lantern light,
but she tells me about candles, taller than she was
at twelve, circling her young mother's coffin
and the Christmas tree planted in sawdust.
Rubbing her scar, there was almost a fire, she says,
when mama's first lover staggered in wailing.
Wincing back tears, she scoops the last glob
into a baggie. When it cools off, she says,
during a nice rain, like my mother & I did,
we'll make soup from all this fat.

THE GOOD DAUGHTER SPEAKS OF DEATH IN PLAIN FACTS
“There is nothing I have buried that can die.”
--from Calle Vision, Adrienne Rich

The dream is always the same. I am lying on my side
on a long, silver table. The clock’s hands have stopped,
but I cannot read the time. It is cold, and I am covered
by a thin white sheet. Only my leg is visible. The leg
of a twenty-year-old, the way my mother saw it when
she took to remembering winning contests with her own.
I stand above it, reach down, touch it. The round ball
of flesh that was muscle falls away from the bone
into the cup of my hand. I drop it, and it shatters
as it smacks against the concrete floor.
It is May. And Spring has come lilting in. I am awake.
Yet I am tired. And it is not a dream. It is not my calf,
not my leg. She is there. And alone. In the front room
of the rowhouse. It is her foot at my feet and the slipper
I pick up from where it skidded across the carpet
as she slid on her way pushing herself up from the chair.
On her way to see what was the commotion of children
in the yard. On her way to see if it was me pulling in
at the curb. There is no other way to say this. I found
my mother, dead, on the living room floor.

It is Sunday. I am a day late. My arms full with an apology
of flowers. They are red. Petunias to bloom along her walk,
endure the summer heat that surely would come. I knock,
but there is no answer. I rise up on tiptoes to peek through
the door glass. I see them there, my mother’s legs sprawled
out across the floor. She is humped over on her side, knees
buckled under. Her foot, small as any child’s, is pale
and limp and bare. Her head bruised in a graze off
an old coal bucket stuffed with souvenirs at the door.
She must have fainted. Her skin is pale. And pasty cold.

Her eyes are closed, the slipper off. I heave under the weight
of her body, shudder at the hurt of it. It is not easy to talk
about death, to talk about her now, her beautiful hands
writing notes to herself so she would not forget some thing,
sending letters across town so that others could not.
I think once, as she suffered my endless questions, I heard her
reply, “yes, yes, you are a good daughter,” as I was writing
out another version of myself, one I could live with, before
death would not let her catch her breath once more.

The clouds are low and light and white. I expected that
when it came to this, it would be a night pierced by rain
clawing a wintry sky, me racing a highway of sirens, the way
I practiced it, as if that would be the only way it could come,
bold and dark, in a frenzy, in a storm. But it is quiet.
I am alone, trying to believe she has gone somewhere her body,
fouled by death, cannot go. Her brow is furrowed, eyes are
closed, lips turned downward as if not to want to see this,
me finding her here and wishing that of what I had to give,
there would have been more.

THIS IS A POEM FOR MY FATHER
..There is my past which is really past...
-from There Is by Guillaume Apollinaire

There are my feet in cotton socks on your toes.
There is a Patti Page waltz, my wing bone arms at your waist.
There I am with you, bathed in light. I hold on tight.
We are dancing.
There is long ago and long to come.
There is a flutter of leaves on a speechless breeze.
There is a wind moving in, in an echo of motion and chatter.
There are clouds in the sky I search for your face.
There are strangers a blur in the crowd, a hum heavy with voices.

There is who you have become, your face a face in the crowd,
one of many faces
on a vendor selling lace from a stall at Les Puces de Paris Saint Ouen,
on the tongue of a Tunisian serving chorizo in baguettes at Gare St-Lazare,
on the ferry captain’s arms at Pont de Neuf carrying me down the Seine,
on the soldier riding the train watching sunflowers grapple the fields,
on the old man’s fingers stained nicotine rolling balls on Coquille Square
on a gypsy boy I tossed coins for a look at your amber eyes on his face
on the Morrocan, Bastille Day, just off Rue St-Antoine. In the street,
we were dancing.

There are words pressed into my fingertips brushing your cheek.
There is me missing all that you might have become. You are large.
There is you looming above me wrapped by your muscled arms,
and dancing.
There is your heart beating hard inside my chest wall.
There is time passing through me like a conduit.
There is long ago. There is long to come.
There is this past that is really past.
There is me suddenly without you.

CHILD, This Poem for My Son
(In Memory of Miroslav Holub)

At the start you grew
hooked to me,
took shape as you should
in the strange
possibility of permutations.

From my largest cell you did spring,
dividing, multiplying, drifting, shifting,
burrowing in the womb wall. You took shape.
Head and tail, buds of arm, leg, heartbeat,
paddle hands, webbed fingers and toes, my little
ducky, puppy asleep at the base of my spine,
turning on our cord connection, my body
making room for you, my heart growing larger
for you. You must hear this as I rock here
and you have turned to go live outside
the danger zone.

You inhabit me still. I loved you
before you were
large enough to see, loved you
before you were
even an idea.

SOMETHING ABOUT
(A Winged Sonnet)
Nature is a foolish place to look for inspiration in,
but a charming one in which to forget one ever had one.
Oscar Wilde

Something about these little song sparrows,
their avian tongues and throaty chortles,
the buzzy twitterings floundering air
just outside the steamy bedroom window.
Something about the rain, the way it clucks
its testy tongue against the glass a blur
with the setting sun’s seductive passion.
Something about these sprightly singers.

Something about the way they tuck themselves
inside their wings devoted to feathers.
Something about the heart here pinned inside,
the tick of it, sky so blue, nimbus moon.
Something about this perch beside the pane
to watch day nestle in a moody moonlight.

I AM REMINDED WHEN THINKING
(after Ivan Klima’s Love & Garbage)

I am reminded, almost as if in whispers
by weathered house plaques on backstreets
of Prague, that behind the damp and musty
walls, those of some importance once must have

nvented themselves above the rest of us here
who, ordinary, press our pens to pads,
our noses to fogged window panes to watch
and clock the melancholic morning drizzle.

Dustbins and brooms push in along the River
Vltava in a hush where shopkeepers drape doors
in lengths of amber beads jostling marionettes,
where sidewalk vendors fling open stall displays,

where I am reminded how shelves are stocked
in a new abundance with buxom breads, aged
cheese, pickled eggs and Postum. How still now
the boat dock silenced of ragtime bandstands

and jazzy improvisational cafes, how later dim
saloons will dance with consonant strung syllables,
how under doorways, in corridors, behind walls,
some of us will find each other with fingertips

and tongues, how we will

make promises and plans, interpret dreams, float
buoyant and rest on the wake of some small slice
of happiness, or on broken speech fill pillows
in relentless streams of muffled grief beneath rime

colored skies where ravens cry. I am reminded
other mornings will wash in misty above sills,
a flurry of poppies in the rain cleared air, halos
of canopies shading the light, reminded we are all

but ordinary mortals here taking on these uphill
cobbled paths where Kafka walked and stopped
above the long stretch of red rooftops to watch
how golden the charm of turrets and domes

held captive by this mother with claws,
how we can regret only
that we are not birds.