Poetry by Nancy Iannucci

Typing…

waiting to hear it from your finger lips
lips on plastic chips tap dancing
in your cave, my caveman,
a work of parietal art,
breathing in the smoky air
under clouds of dense music
waiting to hear it from your finger lips
before I go to bed
when I wake up
lips on plastic chips tap dancing

Typing…

“I miss you, baby.”

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Venus Fly Trap

She rolls over
head down

hungry, weeping
in a fetal position

on a sapphire comforter
held together by four safety pins.

He flies over
doesn’t touch her

he knows she wants him
she can’t reach him

He opens the first pin
pricks her petiole

soothes himself
in wet forests

He unlatches the second pin
puts it in his mouth

“sit the fuck down”
she wilts & waits

unfastening the third, he
spirals her head, humming:

“I don’t know if I love you,
but I don’t know that I don’t”

he watches her
birds fly from the sill

she rolls over, Head Up
mouth open

she snatches him & the fourth pin
then shuts

on the seventh day
she opens

restored
& fierce

her worth
ruler of the Earth.




Fathers

I found James Dean sitting like a hobo up against my back door, pounding & pounding it in
Wittenberg rapture rhythms until I invited him in. He asked me to be his Mary.  I mean the one from
Magdala, he said.    He gave me a loose mission to shield him from flashing parasites who will come
in waves of vaulting locusts, setting fields to ashes, dust to dust, who will chew his ears & legs like
Giotto’s devil then spit out their spin & tweet their tweets with their fat fucking beaks about the
resurrection. I won’t let them in.  I can’t let them in. We need time before the world wakes. I need to
know the truth about fathers & his father, Winton. Did he see him in his other fathers: Frank Stark &
Adam Trask? Fathers! Your Fathers! Our Fathers! The same fathers who sat with vacant smiles
posing for cheap Sears photos with little nascent rebels on their laps. Our Fathers who are or are not
in heaven, driving us to drift until we crack, to drink to fatality, but Dean was the first to crash. Safe
here before the storm / the arrival / we shared anecdotes about our fathers while he washed my hair
clean of nard.

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Bio: ​Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a historian who teaches history and lives poetry in Troy, NY. Her work is published/forthcoming in numerous publications including Bop Dead City, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Gargoyle, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Riggwelter Press, Poetry Breakfast, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Picaroon Poetry, Dying Dahlia Review to name a few. Her debut book of poetry, Temptation of Wood, is due out in May, 2018, published by Nixes Mate Review.

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