Rose Maria Woodson

Saganaki

I have a taste for saganaki.
The gauze of memory blows
in my mind’s window, a lovely
curtain of long ago. My family
takes me out for my birthday. Gift-
wrapped in love, we ribbon
into a Greek restaurant. 
Somewhere on Halsted.
The room is a booming
balloon, popping with Opas & fire.
We start with saganaki. We are
laughing transcendence.

It amazes me.
How we fill & empty.
Moons in our private skies.
Sometimes in the net of morning
silence, we find ourselves
caught in past light,
stained glass windows waiting
for a green light.

Today, 
Chicagohenge,
the sun stubbornly threads rays
through a bricks-and-mortar needle downtown, 
dancing bold as an old uncle still glad
to be alive,
like memory threading through a pause, 
making me crave something
that has nothing
to do with hunger.

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Rose Maria Woodson has been included in Revolute, Cider Press Review, Pedestal 90, Rigorous, Black Fork Review, Litro, Oyez Review, Crack The Spine and elsewhere. Her work also appears in the anthologies Wherever I’m At and Open Heart Chicago. She is the author of two chapbooks, Skin Gin and An Ombre Of Absence, as well as the mini-chapbook Dear Alfredo.