Suzanne Frischkorn  is the author of five chapbooks, most recently  American Flamingo,  (2008), and Spring Tide,  selected by Mary Oliver for the Aldrich Poetry Award (2005).  Lit Windowpane, her first full-length book, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Her poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Indiana Review, Salt Flats Annual, Verse Daily, and the anthology Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, part of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf, 2007) From 2001 to 2005 she served as an editor for Samsära Quarterly.   She is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.

Two Poems

EXILIO

Conch shell pink, this sky echoes an ocean; a song weighted with pearls and sea glass. Mercedes, what did you make of Miami? Did it taste like sunlight on your wrist? White mariposa replaced by ribbon orchid. Jasmine, a scent of dreams. And flamenco? Las Guajiras? Castanets cast on the ground. Your granddaughter will seek you in a hundred mirrors. In Castile, in Cuba, she'll  twine a history with silver thread. The ocean will rise up to whisper in her ear.

Granada

Things are looking at you and you cannot look at them,

lavender daisy, alone in a green sea, if you must drown

it is best to be lavender and alone. Here, in the General

Life gardens, morning glories bloom en masse. A visitor

wonders how exile fell on Moors, harbingers of water's

secrets, they who carved verses on their walls. You lose

yourself, or perhaps, wish to. Late summer garden

you have duende too. Leaving is difficult. Sometimes

to stay invites death. I am speaking of the firing squad,

of having cafe with a friend on Monday, and learning

of his death on Tuesday. Come and see the blood

in the streets. I came to the source, seeking the shape

of my eyes, my nose, I passed as a native, and at last

found a way home. I discovered Cuba in Retiro Parque.

“Exilio" was first published in Indiana Review's Latina/Latino Writers Issue, and both “Exilio” and "Granada" belong to a crown of sonnets that appear in her chapbook American Flamingo, published by MiPOesias Press.