Two Poems by Sara Ries Dziekonski

Ish

My four-year-old asks,
What is this? points
to soy beef chunks
in lopsided lasagna.
It’s meat, I say, ish.
He burps, says,
Excuse me ish.

These days, all I crave
is ish—the forgiving spaces
between, where nothing
is this or that—here
or gone. Pure ish.
Unrecognizable, undefinable,
shape-it-into-what-you-need-able.

I made dinner-ish.
Here’s a bowl of wind
topped with butter and birdsong.

My mother isn’t really dead.
She’s dead-ish.
She visited today,
my blood pressure high, again,
and a belly bigger with each checkup.

Instead of down hospital hallways,
I walked to a café at eleven-eleven Central
when a ladybug flew right to me,
landed on my chest,
almost knocked me over.

We are all here-ish.
Sure, some touch the ground,
and yesterday’s breath
becomes breeze
for wordless land.

*

Pumpkin Patch at the Pier

We sit on haystacks by the antique truck
for a family photo. My mother called me
pumpkin, and now her pumpkin-bell earrings
jingle from my lobes with my every move
as if to dial Mom, because as soon as the stranger
in burnt orange pants snaps several angles
of stills, my mother’s favorite song
Leaving on a Jet Plane soars through the patch
like a grand reunion—
—I raise my daughter
from the nest of my lap, we sprint to the mouth
of song and discover a speaker on a tall pole—
beside it, a bubble machine. Bubbles!
Ella in her pumpkin costume wobbles
through the swell of song with outstretched
hands to pop iridescent planets as my palms
collect the powdered-sugar-magic of absence—
I stuff my skirt pockets with spirit till I’m lifted
by the scarecrows from the soles
of my ground-kissed shoes.

*

Sara Ries Dziekonski (she/her) was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award for her manuscript, Today’s Specials, which was released in September of 2024 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. She is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We’re Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor and Marrying Maracuyá, which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. Ries Dziekonski is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services.