Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

GRANDSON AT TWO

He runs to me, falls in my arms, laughing
again and again—a game we play

while my daughter makes his lunch.
He never tires—

Each time his laughter clacks and clatters, leaps
from him like a mythical bird and rises wet-feathered

from the albumen of the egg,
then flies from his lips—

becoming many mythical birds
stringing themselves in the air,

and the explosions of pleasure seed
their own field somewhere

in the distance where he will return long after
I have gone, the tight tufts of purple

clover, the daisies and black-eyed Susans.

*

MY DAUGHTER, PREGNANT WITH HER SECOND CHILD

To grow a bunch of bananas, it takes nine months.

I see you in the banana’s pinkish-lavender blossom,
petals smooth as a silken sheet,

that appears in the sixth or seventh month,
shaped like an elongated human heart.

You are standing, hands clasped, arms straight,
centered in front of your belly,

and the cupola, the dome of fingers intertwined,
points towards the ground as though

your entire body stood in slender prayer.
From the banana blossom’s petals

spring tiny tubular flowers, each group
called a hand, each flower,

a finger—in her lifetime all that
your own daughter’s hands will hold, recoil from,

or just hang by her sides like indifferent vines.
The banana heart grows from a notched black

stalk that is straight and lengthens towards
the earth like your grandmother’s Sunday cane

beneath her white-gloved hand.
The heart’s petals will fall open

one by one until there is only a fringe
of yellow, decorative, like the hem of a skirt.

*

WOMEN’S VOICES

Ancient Greeks and Romans believed
women had two mouths, an upper and, in the genitalia,
a lower. Both led to a vacant chamber guarded by lips
that are best kept closed.

When women wailed, they were walled
outside the perimeter of the city.

The anatomical deck is stacked against us—
lower voices vibrate in the vocal folds
more slowly as though more

           certain of themselves.

I read that switchboard operators were instructed
to speak slowly to mimic this effect.

That when Margaret Thatcher took voice-
lowering lessons, she was told
to speak as if she had a penis and a cold.

I imagine the lush contours of my daughter’s voice,
vibrations churning through the small bones of her face
as she reads her three-year-old son a story,

the precise notes of my grandmother’s voice
finding their way through the steam as it rose
above her kettle of borscht.

Note: the quote is from Ann Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound”

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at The 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor at-large for Plume Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Dodge, New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, ECHOLOCATION, was on the long list for the Julie Suk Award in 2019.