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Frank C Modica


The Longest Night

The winter solstice
seeps into the silent house.
He sits for hours
outside of a darkened closet.

Heat from the furnace ripples
bags of immaculate dresses,
rows of pressed slacks,
boxes of unwrinkled blouses.

He steps over a crumpled
damp bathrobe, neatly hangs it
next to her scarves.
A ringing telephone goes

straight to voicemail.
At dawn sunlight struggles
through gaps in the curtains.
White snow shimmers in the cold. 
​

Tabula Rasa

Kindergarteners race
across the hardtop
back into the hallway.
Faster children
run circles around
the slower children.
George yells
“tag, you’re it.”
Little Frankie
falls to the ground
after Ellie pushes him.
“She hit me,”  he cries.
He’s cheating,” she yells back.
Tommy pulls Mary’s hair,
Mary kicks him.
Roseau and Calvin
tumble into the classroom
wrestling with each other.
Cal mocks Rosey
“Your whole nature
is a seed of sin.”
Rosey  protests,
“We are noble savages.”

The teacher closes his eyes
to the noise for a few seconds
and shakes his head before
breaking up the fights
and getting the children
under control
“They both are wrong,”
He mutters to himself.
“They don’t know
what they are doing.
They’re children.” 
​

Transubstantiation

Perfect half moon floured shapes sit
on an immaculate white sheet to dry,
raviolis aligned in perfect rows and columns,
their doughy edges crimped with a fork,
four perfect holes poked in the top--
ready for the boiling water,
ready for the red tomato sauce,
ready to be consumed.
But they are almost too beautiful to eat,
too perfect to pass from fork to mouth.

Augustine prayed before his conversion,
“Make me chaste, but not yet.”

In her kitchen grandma measured
the flour in handfuls of this,
the salt and parsley in pinches of that.
working alone without a written recipe,
hours of work to transform
the mundane into the sacred.
No one violated her sanctuary,
no one decrypted the culinary secrets
passed down mother to daughter for generations
in Sicily and carried over to L’Merica.

She hoarded this knowledge
until one Saturday her daughters,
unnerved by the prospect of
grandma’s mortality and
the possible loss of the treasury,
descended on her house
with measuring cups, spoons,
paper and pencil to
pry open her tabernacle.

Grandma was loath
to give up her secrets,
but the daughters pinched the salt,
measured her handfuls of flour.
They squeezed the balls of elastic dough,
trying to quantify the textures
of too much, not enough, not yet,
rechecking measurements, rewriting notes
for this communion, this family tradition.

When grandma finished her raviolis,
she was done--the secrets written down
for other cooks, other dinners;
she never made them
after that afternoon.
The daughters, not yet ready
in grandma’s eyes,
took the recipe home. 
​
Picture


​Frank C Modica's profile

Matinees

Every Saturday Mike and I
walked to the Ramova,
a second run movie house
to watch double features,
cartoons, coming attractions.
We trekked down hot, gritty

city streets in the summer,
tramped through snow
all winter, always stopping
to read comic books
at corner newsstands.
Walking home after the shows

we acted out action scenes,
driving chariots around
the hippodrome or chasing
Japanese Zeroes across
the skies of Guadalcanal.
When we moved out of the city

we went to Saturday matinees
at two suburban theaters.
The owners doubled the ticket prices,
dropped the double features.
In high school Mike went out
for football, I joined the wrestling team.

I got good grades, he got suspended  
for smoking in the boy’s restroom.
I went to college, he barely finished
high school.  Sometimes we’d go to
a movie and try to catch up with each
other. After he died I returned

to the old neighborhood. National
chains had replaced most of the local
stores along Halsted. The Ramova
stood shuttered and shattered,
its battered marquee
gap-toothed and rusty.  
​

Background Noise

A garbage truck rumbles
down the street like
rolling thunder. He
sleepwalks out of the

bedroom, stumbles into
the kitchen. Half-empty
wine glasses glare at him
from the table. Morning

shadows envelop every
room—silent, accusatory.
Heat shimmers from the
slanted garage roof tiles like

an exhausted lover. He
hears a car door open, waits
for a knock at the front door,
doesn’t know if he’ll answer it.
​

Blood on the Wheels

​He might have seen
the cat darting across the street,
or maybe it was his children
crying out from the back seat,
“Stop the car, stop the car.”
But he felt the thump
under his wheels,
he heard the yowling screams.
The children sobbed,
“Help the kitty, Daddy.”
He pulled off to the side of
road, watched the cat
through his open side window,
saw the blood on the street.
The cat writhed in pain,
paws scratching the sky,
but he had places to go,
it was already too late,
he didn’t want to mess up
the car seats and mat.
He put the minivan in gear,
drove away, but his children’s
accusations tore at his heart,
“You killed the kitty.”

Years later driving alone on
the interstate in a different car
he saw the dog, or was it
a coyote? It dashed across
the median on a collision
course with his car.
He tried to slow down
but couldn’t stop in the traffic,
couldn’t safely swing away.
He heard the sickening thud,
felt in his hands the crushed bones.
He didn’t see the animal in his
rearview mirror, there weren’t
any children crying
in the back seat of the car,
but he knew there would be blood. 

​

                                                          The Visitation

​At my first funeral
I sat in the car
with my brother
while my parents
took turns going
to the visitation.
During dad’s stint
in the car he told
Mike and me stories
from old monster movies--
He leaned over
the front bench seat
extending his arms straight out
like Frankenstein and the Mummy,
then his hands became sharp
claws for the Wolfman.
Mike and I looked out of the
rain shrouded windshield of the car.
Flickering street lights
cast shadows over the
Old Mercury, our breaths
condensed on the back window.
We shrank from strange shapes
rustling under wind-warped trees,
and we pleaded with dad,
“Don't leave us alone in the car.” 

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***

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