Three Poems From Anthony Nannetti

OVER UNDER

You demand more space
with a straight face,
and I see
a dead farmer planted in his own north forty
or an obituary written for an obituary writer.
The end is never easy,
but hope is in the bending tree
whose roots will draw life to it.
So sit awhile, I’ll counsel.
Just be still and stay
until I get away.


LEAGUE STREET

The butcher with a young lamb over his shoulder
dodged church-bound widows in the heavy snow.
Monsignor’s Impala was an unfinished Pieta.
I sold shopping bags by a barrel fire
where my father displayed his martyrs and Marys
around the Infant of Prague on a countertop.
A hard grind for a dollar,
and the saints gave way over time
to ballerinas that twirled on musical platforms
and ceramic puppies with saucer eyes.


TO NINO

It was cheaper to kill you than to have you groomed.
I walked home with your collar and leash in a bag,
convinced that all traces of my past were gone.
How like a foreigner I felt, without my bosom friend ----
without turds to collect when I got back,
the house just as we’d left it.


Anthony Nannetti is an English teacher with the School District of Philadelphia. He lives in the Bella Vista section of the city with his wife and two daughters. Nannetti's poetry has appeared in Guardian Unlimited, PhiladelphiaStories, Ygdrasil, Forge Journal, and Bijou Poetry Review.