It’s the Fourth of July, and the narrow sky rises 
behind streets of two-story rowhouses, 
the butcher shop with its plaster cow, telephone 
poles, a sky purple as a bruise filled with fractured 
stars. A green cloud of smoke obscures the moon. 
On this night, every dog on the block runs through 
the streets, dragging its broken lead, while the cats 
creep into the closet or beneath the chassis of old 
Chevies, under the tailfins, flared as the wings 
of manta rays. The red, white, and blue rockets 
spin and sizzle, spitting sparks, a wheel seeded 
with light soaring over the highest rooftops 
before falling in a shower of gold, like Zeus. 
I bury my feet in the wet grass, thinking how 
each rocket rises up singular as a planet or a cloud, 
shaped like jellyfish, submarines, or flags, but they all 
come down the same, losing their shape, their colors 
bleeding into the night sky like chalk after a storm. 

 

—After Ancestral Gold by Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja:

Mixed-media painting copyrighted © by Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja.
All rights reserved. Image appears here with her permission.

Details about the artist are available at
her website Adeola Studio and on her Facebook page.

See also a short interview with the artist in BoldJourney (12 May 2023),
which features several of her paintings and wearable enamel artworks.

 

—“Fireworks Show” by Robbi Nester first appeared at a gallery exhibition featuring the art of Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja, and on the gallery’s website (August 2023); poem appears here with author’s permission.

Robbi Nester

lives and writes in Southern California, where she is a retired college educator and an elected member of the Academy of American Poets. She curates two poetry reading series and is the author of four published books of poetry, including an ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections: Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014). She has four more manuscripts awaiting publication.

Her poems, reviews, essays, and articles have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including among others: Artemis; Book of Matches; Cultural Daily; Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic (Kent State University Press, 2022); SMEOP (Hot) (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, forthcoming); Live Encounters; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Mindfull; Naugatuck River Review; Rhino; One Art; The Journal of Radical Wonder; Tiferet; Valparaiso Poetry Journal; Verse-Virtual; and Zooanthology: About the Animals in Our Lives (Sweetycat Press, 2022).

Robbi has also edited three anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014); Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees, which was published as a special issue of Poemeleon Journal; and The Plague Papers, recently published online at Poemeleon Journal.

Poet’s website: www.robbinester.net

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Dancing White Egret, ekphrastic poem by Robbi Nester after a photograph by Philippe Rouyer, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022)

⚡ After Blossom, ekphrastic poem after an etching by Phil Greenwood in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 3, May 2020)

⚡ In Memory, five poems by Robbi Nester in Live Encounters (August 2021)

⚡ Three Poems in Verse-Virtual (January 2020)

⚡ Law of Attraction, ekphrastic poem after Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, in Verse-Virtual (May 2019)

⚡ Night Tunnel, ekphrastic poem after a painting by Robert Rhodes, Philadelphia Night Train, in The Ekphrastic Review (21 April 2016)