Phillip Polefrone

Phillip Polefrone lives in Brooklyn. His poems have appeared in The Broome Street Review, his essays in Mercer Street. He is trying to find his way out of school at the same time that he is trying to find a way to stay in it forever.

The Young

In your uncle’s kitchen
in the hills,
walnut-wrinkled hands
muscle your cousin’s
hair to braids; young
hair, young hands
that capture your hair, too,
turn it on itself
so scarcely.

The kitchen is the place
where the old braid
the young braid
the young: the old
say, In Russia
it is cold. There,
they do not feed you.

***
In your uncle’s kitchen
it is late;
the porch light
casts shadows into the room
where together
we speak of the hills
we’d like to have,
and of the house
among them,
the porch,
the light;
it would cast shadows
through the window.

You say, It’s ours.
We never have
to leave.

***
In my kitchen
we switch unmeasured
lengths of sadness
among the unwashed
glasses,
twist them into
braids, switch
back. We say,

We are young,
and we
are much too old
for this.
Let us never have
to leave.