Anthony Liccione
Anthony Liccione is from Upstate New York and has been writing poetry for 13 years. He has recently won the LizaBeth Poetry Award and Unscrambled Eggs Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Meeting of the Minds Journal) and Best Poem of Year 2005 (Muses Review). He released his second chapbook Parched and Colorless with The Moon Publishing, and a full-volume book of poems Back Words and Forward (ISBN: 1424113563). He is a proofreader for an online writing resource site TheWriting Bug.
Surrender to Myself
A child is at my window,
pale and frail, a mouth straight
and crossed as a pin-
with see-through eyes
he pierces at me with his past,
stitching it on into my future.
And there I see his father,
putting him down in the crib
for the night, and closing his
bedroom door then walking away,
a way he never came back and
opened the door again.
Now ill-fated it is for me
to watch this child standing
outside the fire, I want to draw
the blinds and pull down the shades
to the scales under his eyes,
and as I do, shutting out this someone
casting his gaze like black coals
glowing reddish from an after burn.
A coerce nudges at me to tell him
that I know his walk where shallow
steps fall on hard concrete, the street
I identified with long ago,
that could end if went unwary.
And our faces become transparent
in the three-dimensional window,
with the ghost of me oppositely
haunt with his image, as a seasoned
leaf cuffing against a green leaf,
I saw that child crying at night
on his pillowcase. I saw a moon
that wouldn't let go until the break
of dawn. I wondered if when it
rained in Baltimore, it rained
in New York the same time.
I wondered if tears fell in heaven.
After I curtained the contained
face immersed in the window,
I went up the dark staircase
washed my hands and face,
and went to his bedroom, echoing
beside the unfinished B-9 model
airplane with detached wings-
where I peeked through the blinds,
to find him gone, leaving remnants
in parallel of no one on the sidewalk.
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