Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
​

POEM FOR THAT CRAZY BASEMENT

Eerie, the host’s hushed third-floor mirrored hall. Room after room,
wall-lined Brazilian Rosewood-windowed cabinetry, lit within: ornate
candelabra, outsized inlaid service trays, chubby cherubs circling silver
ice pails. I roamed rooms for a grand tureen the host’s wife insisted as
centerpiece, that my mother’s lobster bisque, prepared for one hundred
twenty, would fill. The first course.

Out of our basement came Angie’s catering business. Word of mouth
lured the northwest suburban mansions to her calendar, double-booking
every weekend, day events, evening affairs, three seasons until unfailing
arctic cold felled the city again. Still she booked favorites.

Often we returned the following day, the retrieval of banquet prep tables,
commercial-sized coffee makers, specialty knives, tools her alternating
staff exhaustedly left behind. And always, down a manicured hill’s lawn
edge lay a mammoth haphazard garbage heap. Heavy-duty garbage bags
pecked and plucked wide open. Unrecognizable foodstuffs tumbled out
atop the green expanse. Incorruptible handsome ravens. 
Partaking of easy bounty.

The party event menus themselves took on rousing personalities.
Clientele envisioned Angie a nourishing servant. Zeal glistened like hot
pig fat on their faces. Paraded through homes, she was shown luxurious
crooks and expanses. If some exotic object were cracked, broken, quite
valuable otherwise, often it would be offered, and she took. Random
rooms frequently kept exactly square, alabaster, utterly empty. Angie
adored this.

No reason why, only she felt calm.
I may be wrong. I find I’m wrong more and more often.
Nothing to covet. No wish too heady. But Angie.
In a boxy vacant room by herself with nothing--
burlesque-worthy, I have to figure. What of it.
Never was one day with my mother
in good conversation.
I was assured those rooms had no windows.
Barely doors.
I listen to fable.

                        Once there was a jet-winged bird
                      who gained a window where there
     was not one. It could tilt a polished eye with
     unfettered regard through ivy-framed glass.
                Like a most beneficent guided missile
unsubtle and accurate, its beak so much more
                                                            than capable.
​
I bank on that raven
in its hurtling descent, wings tucked tightly in, then
the instinct instantly to outstretch utterly
and break.

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Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow has published two full length collections of poetry, Horn Section All Day Every Day, and The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor (Salmon, 2018 and 2012). Horn Section All Day Every Day was a 2020 Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award Finalist. Other honors include the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, Tusculum Review Poetry Prize, Willow Review Prize for Poetry, a Beullah Rose/Smartish Pace Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Plume Poetry Anthologies-Volumes 5, 7, and 11, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, Gargoyle, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Ilanot Review, Los Angeles Review, Plume, Salamander, Smartish Pace, Texas Review, and Verse Daily, among other venues.