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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| “like a thread”
like a thread learnt to be clipped
to be flipped and to float stretched into the pool of air
limbs at their limits for anything clean
fleeting moments that prompt
of warm woolen blankets and
soft supple mouths on her feathered blond
cupped on the carpet in napkins and cotton balls
summoned with summer highlighted hair
suntanned arms ringed by hugs of your new green shirt
and your new fire green eyes
more fetching and fluid than ever before
yes she’ll speculate our dynamics
our dialogues even our quiet and how it’s
quills bow beneath the hush
and he will wonder justly
if perhaps you’ve altered your style to blend
with the assets of my design
we’ve been told of Love
tapestries tiaras and talismans
surely she does not squat as a boy
callow akimbo and crass
on the roughhewn linoleum floor
so night finds me fetching faults
do i squat? is my posture poor?
(it flashed flourished
and for that instant it was supreme)
am i too fidgety? too foul?
like clay skilled to be squished
thumbs palms forefingers
cotenants rifted and twisted
perhaps i have overlooked
the sagacity of your sick joke
perhaps i have become too comfortable on your chest
even in coldest december
she will walk beneath the elms
boundless and bold
she will tug at her skirt
she will even let the snowflakes dance on the back of her neck
(if they feel like dancing)
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| “boy”
candles
and clarinets kindle
the orange glow
that curls up and over
the chimney flu where
vines dare not crawl
carrying and complimenting
the blue of your eyes
like a ghost or a cancer
so honest
it becomes vigorous working
its way from the chest to the
shoulders, as music inhibits
dancing, so sincere it
can be breathed on the
air
and make lucid
muscle and bone
with night
its fragmented melody
is swept away
with your hemline and
swam back as a boy
with words far too wise to be
poems
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| “God&Gideon/guns&greasepaint”
God dismounted her horse and let
the trail of her wedding gown coil in the
red dirt.
“i’m Gideon”his first words not plunged
but plumed the spell of silence betwixt
his introduction and mine.
it was good.
hours on the ottoman beneath his father’s gun
collection. rugburns. birthmarks. bedsheets.
and we’d dig our toes into the mattress.
and we’d dip our toes in puddles of cool summer rain..
i left him something soft on his cheek
(reminders of greasepaint and shaving cream)
and i could feel the quiet purr of tugboat-angels
course through his blood:
we lay on his mother’s afghan in the back
of his orange pick-up as God
breathed one last pink stroke into the
sunset, all cumulous and ethereal. curled in it,
we bloomed like apple blossoms, left to
become ripe and eventually
be eaten.
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| “for those who wet their bed or stood alone in right field, picked flowers, and drew pictures of unicorns in the yellow mud. we forgive and commend you here.”
champions, the bell tolls not for you
but beckons those comparable to
hardening wads of gum beneath
ever-studious wooden desks.
chides the churchgoer
through a series of poems, whose
subject is primarily dirt:
“your sweater’s a garden
a v-neck. a spade.
turns over the soil.
loosens the dirt.
neatly stitched
pervades the invaders
&makes way for the bulbs.”
—we’ve set aside dirges
for when your belly emerges:
but the now-sagamores
impart a writ for the ages
o, champions, the bell tolls not for you
(for fireworks are lessened
in love between those comparable
to spanish moss).
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“ all the Smiths wake beneath ice ”
the cancerous blond from her
off-white sedan poses a luckless plunge into
the sludge of a dark frozen swamp. there she
is pegged with her sisters and
brothers in their white polo shirts
and their pressed khaki pants.
then haphazardly she is exhumed to burn blistered and
bare through the hot desert
sand: to slide with blue iridescence
through stale bread and stucco. above
worn pantyhose on the cold pueblo floor. betwixt
cakes and candles and
brightly wrapped packages; horseflies
and hair combs and unfinished looms left out to slake the
sunset.
a tireless journey, cactus clenched in her
hand, bleeding profusely in the most appropriate hues. carrying
in her skull the even fiercer Memory:
when before the sharpest instrument
necessary was her kind mezzaluna.
and
what came to scrounging for the
softest wood with which to lay her bed.
the holes in her shoes and the soup on the table and
her leather-skin drum. the things she traded for bottles
of wine and wining black crows
on the neck of Deception.
but, now, when her hand
digs into the hot red earth, with hopes to heal her
wound, it ascertains only earth. well,
earth and Disappointment;
and what she had tried for years
to capture with coyote hair and tubes of tempra paint;
and what would supplement palaver
for a ferry ride as she returns to the river styx.
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