Skip Navigation

Transparencies

by M.J. Iuppa  

Whenever I pass your barn, I wonder
what it was like in the Fall of 1988?
Did I notice it back then, or just drive
by, unaware that its hand-hewed beams
were weather diaries & its gable roof
was shedding shingles, one by one,
without a second thought?

Pigeons fly cautiously in your yard.
They have lived in your barn for years,
ignoring its incoherent poverty.

Now twilight’s indigo wings come
& go through smashed panes
to roost in the loft’s ancient hay, waiting
for the cracked beams to pull apart, inch
by inch, another year’s fraction closer
to that split roof leaking its dangerous
light for all of us to see.

By M.J. Iuppa

M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. For the past eight years, she and her husband Peter Tonery have been committed to food sustainability. She has numerous publications (poetry, fiction, nonfiction and plays) in national and international journals as well as two full-length poetry collections Night Traveler (Foothills, 2003) and Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collection, 2010) and five chapbooks; her latest prose chapbook is Between Worlds Foothills, 2013. She served as the poetry adviser (2007-2012) for the New York Foundation for the Arts, and since 1986, has worked as a teaching artist in the schools, K-12 for a variety of agencies (RCSD, BOCES 2, Young Audiences, Genesee Valley BOCES, Project U.N.I.Q.U.E. and V.I.T.A.L. Writers & Books, and others) Currently she is Writer-in-Residence and Director of Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College. Her e-mail address: