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Two poems by RUTH MADIEVSKY

Fountain

Jardin des Tuileries, May 2013


Sitting beside this ancient gray
fountain, I’m thinking that you are probably
alive somewhere in the world,
and I don’t know how I feel
about that. You’re tightening
the screws of a run-down swing set
in an apartment complex in Hollywood
and winking at the girls
who are waiting on the grass for you
to finish: girls with Lisa Frank notebooks
in their backpacks and macaroni and cheese
in their teeth, girls who
don’t even have breasts yet,
girls with mothers
who fishtailed their hair
before school that morning and fathers
who won’t let them see
PG-13 films. Or maybe
you’re eating a peanut butter sandwich
in a prison cell, peeling away the crust
like a bitter store clerk
tearing the dress off a mannequin. You’re buying
extra-small thongs at Victoria’s Secret. You’re sinking
your nails into the skin of a peach.
You’re licking your fingers. I think
I need to stop thinking. I think this fountain
is made of the same material as tombstones.
I think that if you ever
met the moon, you would
grab her by the throat.



  
146  The Paris-American

Tell Me


about the time we stole pears in Surprise, Arizona
                      and let cornfields undress us
           in Assumption, Illinois
There were terra cotta armies in our hearts
           We listened 

                      to the shell’s mouth
And tell me how the day poured its honey
           over everything, and after, 
the memory of everything
           How we wore our skin like a question
There was lidocaine, yes, and apples
                      from the cemetery
           And tell me how our tea danced
to the tides of the moon
                      How I got sick
           That I got better
Leave out the part 
           about the air being toxic,
how it opened us
                      like figs
           Tell me instead
about my eyes
                      under the ponderosa tree
           What was it you called them?
Red wine
           on a shard of glass



  
147  The Paris-American

Picture
Originally from Kishinev, Moldova, Ruth Madievsky lives and writes in Los Angeles. She studied creative writing and biology at the University of Southern California, where she received the Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Prize for fiction and the Phi Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award for her poetry chapbook-in-progress. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, The MacGuffin, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Atticus Review. She is a graduate student at USC's School of Pharmacy. 


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