Christina Misite
poetry
Christina Misite grew up in New England but has spent almost half her life in San Antonio, where she currently resides. She teaches literature and creative writing for Southern New Hampshire University’s online program. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cimarron, and Concho River Review.
Just This Morning
I found two geckos
hemidactylus turcicus
in my pool, skin stiffening to gray.
No eyelids against chlorine’s teeth. No ritual
but the slow sweep of my skimmer
tipped precisely to avoid the rip
in the net’s left side.
They were both tiny, two little thumbs.
I wonder if they came to this together,
if I should give them a story, construct some life.
But my words turn belly up
at the cold, hard fact of them
now scattered at the base of my banana tree.
At every meal I taste their bleached bones.
Last week it was a bird by my slider,
broken neck, oily smudge
on the glass where it hit.
Last week a hurricane and
a stampede killing hundreds
and a trip to the grocery store
(a gallon of distilled water, two frozen dinners)
and I had the flu. Always there is war,
in other countries, in our own veins.
I can’t help but feel
that this is its dark way of coming to my door.
Or just placing there what has been waiting
all along in the hushed grass.
“ This piece was started over a decade ago but still feels timely, which I suppose is part of the point. I remember feeling overwhelmed by tragedies, both local and global, and finding those two little lizards felt both ominous and like the last straw. This poem was my attempt to process the ache. ”