Don Narkevic



My visiting grandchildren walk
slow as museum tourists
not really knowing what to look at,
my hometown’s Merchant Street
dotted with empty storefronts
Matisse might have dropped
on the ground hoping for art
and wanting to start over
when one of the kids asks
What’s that? and I explain
it used to be a bakery
and one of the kids asks
What’s that? and I explain
Polish rye, poppyseed rolls,
paczki, kolaczki, the smell
of sweet yeast dough, the whiteness
of the boxes and cotton twine,
the checkerboard floor, Immaculate
Mary Church down the block,
how I would sit on the steps
eating chrusciki, angel wings,
wafer-thin, crisp bow ties
of fried dough dusted
with confectioners’ sugar
and one of the kids asks
What’s that? and I explain
it’s something fine
like the first snowfall
and how it doesn’t last for long.

Don Narkevic: Buckhannon, WV. MFA National University. Recent poetry appears in Garland, Hedge Apple, Discretionary Love, Pink Ochre Magazine, and Culture Cult. In 2022, Main Street Rag published a novella of poetry, After the Lynching. In 2024, The Potomac Playmakers produced From Birth. In 2025, the author won the Ziolkowski Poetry Prize.