Elected – Withdrawn
Inexplicable desire
to tidy the kitchen
sweep the floor
move geraniums
into southern sun
slant of light on
the new mousepad—
Positano seascape, or
somewhere in Liguria
each evocative
locale charged
& relieved
you were mostly
unconscious
when they stormed
the rotunda; dead
almost at sunrise
on the morning
of the inauguration
spared your daughter’s
Orange County
conservative bile
of course, you would
have voted
the right candidate,
morality prevailing,
even if our labor-loving
dad coerced
& brainwashed—
the cosmos of you
unbearable today,
the messages
archived on the iPhone
blast a hole
through the chest
each sound
tinged by
the growing dementia
of your decline
We listened
to the young poet
recite the new
promises
of the earthly
administration
in the shudder
we’re not sure
we heard
Spoiler Alert
Mildly offended, when students asked,
who I wanted to win the game? Game?
This real life three months in real time
of half-awake late nights and barely
functioning next days. Devastating.
I had just knighted my aging dog:
Mr. Austin Powers of House Targaryen.
My partner: son of Dany of House Targaryen
as our mother—multiple strokes,
fractured hip—no longer
able to track conversation, is crowned
mother who won’t die. Meanwhile,
Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons,
Queen of Seven Kingdoms goes mad
and is stabbed to death in just two
episodes? If I’d watched
the series from the start,
over an eight-year period, there’d be
no wrath crazed enough. No Winterfell
unfallen, no north wall tall enough to watch
White Walkers fall and shatter from.
In Feel Fly (In Field Fly)
She insisted on driving me
and making sure the uniform
was spotless, knotted with three
thick pieces of black fabric
to the inside upper right seam
just below the belt in case
I needed to ward off the evil eye.
Never alone in this ritual,
our multiethnic team full
of superstitions and mis-
pronouncements. Her English
never good enough for the citizen-
ship exam, which she aced in
decent Spanish. Remembering
Mineola, NY as the test site
to the border patrol questions
that night after venturing over
to the Canadian side of Niagara
without her ID. What pride
and surprise that day
at the game when the umpire
missed the call and mamma
startled up in a holler,
“in feel fly, in feel fly”—
as that impossibly tall ball
dropped, uncatchable falling
star, and we lost the game.
Poet-editor-translator, Peter Covino’s most recent book, What Sex Is Death? Dario Bellezza, Selected Poems (2025) won the Wisconsin Press Prize for Poetry in Translation. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island, and his poetry has been published widely in such journals as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a day, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Seneca Review, and the Yale Review, among others.