Spring 2011, Volume 10

Poetry by David Scronce

The Wedding Feast at Cana

When we say
white nectarine, white peach,
we mean the flesh,

the perfume that escapes
along the tongue,
the green lip

of the white dish,
the wedge we would save,
cannot.

Plums litter the lawn.
How fecund, the falling.

Requiem

Bee, ODed
on succulent nectar,

swept up among
raspy leaves,

legs curled, your body still
fuzzed with summer,

you do not see
the plum, fruit gone

to a patch of lawn.

Stigmata

Your first church never leaves you,
like the first scar, or the graphite tattoo
on the hillock of your palm,
Golgotha for your pocket,
where your sister pencil-stabbed you.
Forty years it lasts. Then the doctor laughs
and you laugh too. Children at their homework.
Now that sister bruits a text:
It is Easter. He is risen.
You would resist this missive.
Still, something in you rises, as if on cue.

 

 

BIO: By day, David Scronce is the director of student service systems at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.F.A. from the writing seminars at Bennington College.

He is the author of the chapbook
Letters to Liam (Red Berry Editions, 2009). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 5AM, Bennington Review, The Chaffin Journal, Cloud View Poets, Confrontation, Hayden's Ferry Review, modern words, Poetalk, The Portland Review, The Queen City Review, Review/Revue, RHINO, RUNES, Salamander, Sierra Nevada Review, Squaw Valley Review, and online at Four and Twenty, PoetryBay.com, Softblow, and ChaparralPoetry.net.