I’m eating linguini with garlic and oil when here comes the angel
again. She spreads her wings which are larger than
you might think, sits across
from me at the kitchen table
pushing aside the cup and newspaper.
Before I can say What? She looks at me
with a mean smile, the blade’s handle
sticking out of the folds
of her white robe.
The last time I saw her
was on the highway
when I jerked the steering wheel
hoping the right lane was clear.
It was.
There was a crashed car
in the darkness between lights.
A cop said that the driver was dead.
Hit and run, he said. I saw the angel
standing on the roof of the dead guy’s car with her hands on her
hips. In the early 60s, our house filled with smoke.
My brother came home at two a.m.
leaving the girl at the bar,
saving us.
He had a bad feeling, he told my mother,
who coughed in his arms.
We stood on the front lawn
under more stars than I’d ever seen,
and there she was, the angel, gorgeous and angry,
a madwoman made of sparks staring me down.
The first time I saw her I was caught
in a cross current off Fire Island when my brother-in-law
swam out and saved my ass.
The angel hovered above the shoreline caught in a sundog,
blinding me. And now, with her elbows on the table
she smiles and says Soon, asshole, rises from the chair.
A wing sparking across the counter knocks
the coffee pot to the floor as she walks off through the kitchen wall.

LENNY DELLAROCCA is founding editor and former publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal. Poems forthcoming in Figure 1, Wisconsin Rev., Cimarron Rev and North Dakota Quarterly. He has invented the Epoem a new form on display at his new poetry journal, Witchery, which is embedded online at South Florida Poetry Journal.