Florence Weinberger

Still Life with Apples

​windfall apples withering to brown
before they can be culled
sauced or clumped
with drooping hyacinths
blue grapes and melting pears
amassed for the palette
as if the color of rotting
will hold still

they painted the putrid, prettied
the bloody bandages
with skill the sickly smells
emanated off the canvas
you could inhale Van Gogh’s
unwashed peasants but never
Rothko’s stacked colors yet
each in their aching ways
could crack you

make it new, Pound said, as if
we grow in each succeeding era
an impervious skin an armor
for the horror and so for the lone
wolf and the black-clad teen-ager
with the weaponized vest we must
learn anew how to paint
a perishing beauty

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Florence Weinberger has published 4 books of poetry, most recently Sacred Graffiti, with another forthcoming from Tebot Bach. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, River Styx, Comstock Review, Nimrod, Miramar, Cider Press Review, Poetry East, others, and numerous anthologies. She served as a judge for the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Contest.