Attar of Petals

What was in his pockets?
Among unknown receipts,
the thing he left for me:
the rose he tore for me,
the fragrance, the attar
of petals.

Pears and peaches tumble down
and spill across the table.
The moon is dark.

I will love him until feral
cats cross the seas from Rome
and overtake Wall Street,
and walk among abandoned trash,
the coffee cups,
and the rotted attachés.

I will love him
until iron coffers are so full
they break apart and gold and silver
fall into the Hudson River.

Sharon Israel

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Sharon Israel’s chapbook Voice Lesson was published in 2017 by Post Traumatic Press. She won Brooklyn College’s Leonard B. Hecht Poetry Explication Award, was nominated for “Best of the Net” 2016 and won Four Lines’ 2020 winter poetry challenge. Sharon’s work most recently appeared in Flatbush Review and in the Orchard Lea Press anthology Close Up: Poems on Cancer, Grief, Hope and Healing and Discretionary Love. Sharon hosts the radio show and podcast, Planet Poet-Words in Space. For more information: https://linktr.ee/sharonisraelpoet.