Response to a Request for a Love Poem
by Vincent Francone
My wife wears her gold earrings in the summer nights
going to dance wearing black looking like the small hours
her skin the cinnamon of angry skies.
Her eyes match her clothing
which she wears like fog combing over the skyline.
Her fingers are peninsulas
her back is a map with rivers from my fingers
her feet hold her to the earth
her toes are painted like beach-washed stones
her hair falls like empires
or is coiled like the center of a sunflower.
She wears her hair off her shoulders
and I never fail to lock onto what little memory remains
of our first careless ardor
while she meanders through our conflict
as assiduously as she works on her make up.
Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.
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Read a review for Like a Dog:
A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.
A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.
