Tag: M. Nasorri Pavone

Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927 by M. Nasorri Pavone

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Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927

        From a vintage photo of high school girls in shop class

Were we brazen or that curious?
We were certainly teased
for putting our hands at risk.

Anyone with a beef about it
blamed the school for our folly.
But what if we didn’t grow out

of our interests? We guessed why
we had to read The Scarlet Letter.
We learned what was expected.

Some killjoy compared us to Eve
with the snake rolling out
an auto-size apple.

From where you sit we look
as united as an all-girl garage band
posing for an album cover,

our blunt bobs, our Mary Janes
beneath our rolled up cover-all cuffs.
The boys called us degenerates.

So? What we’ll never know is
how you came to love us in a way
we’ll never get to share.

At left there’s me, Grace Hurd. That’s
Evelyn Harrison, Corinna DiGiulian,
and Grace Wagner under the car

at Central High in Washington D.C.
We weren’t kidding. We got in there,
got greasy, made that engine sing.

*

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, The Citron Review, Innisfree, Rhino, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review, 86 Logic, and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated several times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Finding a Split Pod by M. Nasorri Pavone

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Finding a Split Pod

The sunlit gold of its concavity
gleamed treasure to me
in the smoothly paved alley
behind a high-rise and two motels.
I thought jewelry case.
It could have slipped out
of Room 7 with the two lovers
who went through it like they did
the sheets and the towels,
the sealed cups and the soap.
The treasure humbled in my hand:
one half of a split pod,
feather canoe, a seed vessel
sent forth to find earth
by the mother vine
up against a white wall.
The pod cradled its gold
with a shell as carved
and wrinkled as a walnut.
I looked for the other half
and there it was, but why
do that? And you know
I married the two and they fit.
So, here’s their story. They began
as one and grew together.
There was falling and a force
that wrenched them in two,
but their splitting up,
as unfavorable as that sounds
from a narrative standpoint,
did expect a birth.
If he and I ever began
somewhere as one it makes sense
that we’d have no memory of it,
no awareness of each other
because no other
would have existed then.
In his embrace I am sealed.
We fasten to each other
with eyes, lips, bellies.
When we pull away
it may be for a brief
or the longest while
but there it is: the wide open space.
What rattles between us
will break out, get some air,
find other ways in.

*

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, The Citron Review, Innisfree, Rhino, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart Prize.