Three Poems

Portrait of the Artist as a Headless Dutch Boy

I carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand.  I picked out seaweed and shells.                   
I do not pour my buckets
into troughs     feed cows         plant bulbs,
but I work in my own way.
I thought
I was a tulip once,
but now I think clearer,                       and I understand you,
small porcelain figure.
We are the same in our way.
White, bloated skin, you are cold and drowned.
Washing up you wanted                     some new life in a cabinet.
Painted smooth,                                  someone thought of art,
stability,          sent you on your way.
Your work is done. Now rest.

 Family-Portrait as Ellis Island Ferry

Call it demolition by neglect.
Call it how cruel can you be when you’re gone
if you’ve gambled that your wife will die
before you or that she won’t but
you won’t be able to care when you’re gone.
Call it my grandmother vomiting
into her bowl, two meals ruined:
the ship over before they flipped
her two eyelids over with buttonhook.
Call it the way my grandfather lost his boat:
low-tide went out and slipped
the bow under a dock. Crushed sails.
Rowing out to the middle of the early morning lake
steam rising off our wake, we stare straight
down in the brown glass-water, strain to see
the Dewdrop, old hotel ferry in our old hotel town,
call it what it is: sunken.

 Portrait of the Artist’s Father as Dentures & Toothbrush

You can get anything you want in Manhattan,
you raved, coming home with your new teeth
just in time for a family vacation to Florida.
Your teeth were like mine – soft, cavity-prone –
when you had them.  Lots of root canals
and bloody floss, but straight and small and white.
When the doctor took them all out, your mouth
swelled up like a drowned, red body. You gagged
until they cut away the back of the false teeth.
Then, you left them around the house tucked
into napkins at dinner or in the car cup-holders.
No one ever wanted to find them.
And when you lost them for good, just before
our trip, you called in sick to work and for $800
you bought a new set, rush delivered, in the city.
And when we came home, and grandma said
she’d found them, under the bed, next to the dog toys,
didn’t we all laugh at the dog wearing your dentures?

Object

Headless Dutch Boy Figurine, Dentures, Ellis Island Ferry

Body of Water

Dead Horse Bay, Lower New York Bay

About the Artist

Kristin Maffei is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a first-year MFA student at NYU.  She is an Associate Editor at Oxford University Press and co-founder of the collaborative literary ‘zine Call & Response (www.callandresponsezine.com). Kristin's poetry has been featured in qarrtsiluni, The Little Jackie Paper, In Flux, and on a few buses in Oxfordshire. Her nonfiction work has appeared in a variety of newspapers in Putnam County, NY, and she once wrote a book on horses.