Jeannine Pitas

The Last Good Days

There they lie, the last Buendías
making love on Dutch linens
in a tropical climate

with the breeze barely rustling
lace curtains.

They don’t know
of the one who faced the firing squad
and lived.

They don’t know
of the bearlike family matriarch

or the disobedient daughter
imprisoned in a convent across the sea
for the crime of chasing butterflies.

They don’t know
of the wind about to come

the page about to turn
the child devoured by ants.
Maybe decadence isn’t so bad

if it comes with lovemaking
and sunsets, wine and awe

at the moon.
With every kiss we say goodbye
like a baby mumbling

her first words
or an elder with dementia

mumbling her last.
Present, not needing to know
what we say,

we’re happy at last
to belong.

We embrace until the sand blows in
and the walls and floor shake
and the page is turned.

ORD —> MVD

I’m flying
across the bottom of the sky

but not the top
of the anthroposcene

my flight might be part of the reason
why winter lasts one week

why a Pittsburgh February
feels like early summer

I’m flying across an imaginary line
made of walls and dogs and deserts

I’m flying over jails
where children sleep on hard floors

over towns where the young disappear
while the old lament

over a country that built
a prison with lights that never go out

with inmates forced to stand
for twenty hours each day

over another country
where an ex-revolutionary leader

has shut down all the newspapers, TV stations,
and now, even churches

I fly over illegal gold mines
oil-filled rivers

over the patchwork quilt rainforest
ever more frayed

tomorrow I will land
in a city in love with the sea

I will walk along its beach
look up at its lights

drink te con leche
eat bizcochos

discuss poetry with old friends
feel the March autumn breeze

read poetry in an art gallery
eat at the pizzeria that was once

Darwin’s waystation
admire a statue of Confucius

talk with people who stopped an open-pit mine
from being built on their land

and ten days later I will fly home
over churches and Lenten processions

over jungles and deserts and skyscrapers
over weddings and infant baptisms and

adult baptisms and wars
over guardabarrancos and nutrias

over people who speak Quechua
and Aymara and Guarani

and Ixil and Quiche and Mixtec
over children who love their parents

over species who embrace in the night
over burning and breaking and rebuilding

over a world
that will hold all the women

and men, the children and plants,
the turtles and frogs

if we let it

Feast of the Holy Trinity

I stand in a white and gold church
both different and similar
to the ones I know.

I try to grab onto the Mass,
the singing of a language
with just a few words at ears’ reach.

The pews are filled with women, so many women,
children, so many children,
very few men.

Prayers rise for victory,
for an end to the war
just a short border crossing away.

In March 2022
six million Ukrainian refugees passed through this city,
thinking that in a few short weeks
they’d go home.

North of here
there’s another border
made of fields and forests

where refugees from Syria and Sudan
are not called brothers and sisters
but kicked like a soccer ball between borders
and left to die among bison.

But here in the South, Rzeszów is booming.
On a Sunday night, cafes and bookstores bustle,
couples stroll hand-in-hand by the river,

children eat ice cream,
trusting their parents
won’t send them east to fight
just as Belgian and British and American parents won’t.

But they still know how fast
the war could come to them
as, so many times, it has done before.

In church, the young priest gives a prayerbook
to a girl in a white first communion dress
while a bespectacled boy in the back
hugs a stuffed bear.

The altar servers wear shorts and light-up sneakers
under their white robes.
The women in floral dresses smile,
defiant in oranges and reds –
pink lipstick,
glittered eyelids,
coiffed hair.

They line up to receive the Eucharist,
wait for the final blessings,
hoist their babies over their shoulders
and keep on chatting in the doorway
long after the Mass’s end.

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