Tonight's Poet Corner: Angels

Angels
by Belinda Roddie

Funny, how all the women I've loved
have contained an 'a' within their name:
Mostly at the beginning, shouldering
the burden, but others elsewhere, and

while it may seem simply facetious
to see coincidence in the mouth of
language - or commonality, truly,
given vowels' investment in our
kisses - I can tell, while counting

its teeth, how much the faces still
shine in the enamel of my memory:
My first crush, paralyzed like an
insect in a tree's tears; my college

infatuation, sharing a namesake
with sweet, falsehood-hating, suicidal
Karenina; my own wife, the forest
residing in a French utopia - and lately,
the abbreviation of an angel, brown curls

and a crafty smile, trading words like
hot coals during a rainy Manhattan late
afternoon. Funny, that; funny, life,
and funny, names and nomers

on the fingerprints of strangers and
lost loves - or the "illusion" of love,
or the "delusion" of it(?) - makes me
wonder where my priorities lie,
if only in a castle with legs and one

singular mighty peak, the bridge drawn
across its stitched mouth, lexicon lovely
in twilight. Lexicon magnificent in
moonlight. Nomenclature numbing

in the last novocaine burst of an urban
stick of dynamite. ABCDEFGHIJKaboom.