Lemon Silence

This morning the dentist. She scraped my old teeth
clean like a Roman monument or the Sacré Coeur
in Montmartre where Stendahl and Zola rest. Every
spring in Paris they start washing her north of the main
gate and reach the other side a year later only to see
she’s already blackened where they began. You left

me a lemon on the doorstep. It seemed all spring we set
up camp every night to pull it down again in the morning
each day we got faster got faster at tearing things down
I took comfort from the great poet who wrote angels
cannot distinguish between the living and the dead.
On the stone steps the lemon you left.

Juncos’ nest in the hanging basket by the front door
greeted me for a month with their tsktsktsk warning calls
facing me from roof or birch branches whether I
was leaving or coming home. Shady place. Plant shaggy.
Greens pouring out along the sides like a waterfall.

My Puerto Rican friend says these birds are lucky signs
in his country—are we not now both of us American
born or otherwise included—when he smashed his car,
black blossoms on his torso. Could no longer speak.
Luck is to know which silence hurts and which doesn’t.

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Gunilla T. Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015), and two chapbooks, Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009), with Finishing Line Press. Her work has or will be published in American Journal of Poetry, Great Lakes Review, Pendemics, I-70 Review, Slipstream, and Trampoline.