–Man’s rejection, God’s protection. I am exactly like I am. No water of mistrust here. Swamps, perhaps. The heavy coil of wood. Bones to go with it. There was no landscaper in your life, there was no man without a car, there was just me: The brake in the stomach feels no pain; the break in the heart, everything. White hair of frost, powder and grey, the […]
Your grandmother loved me from the day we met but not enough. She told you you should keep me, as though a Boy Scout badge, something to put in a shoebox or sew with thin stitches onto your sash. Keep her. I wasn’t repelled by her stories of viscera, of reaching into the red cavity, gripping the muscle, squeezing when it wouldn’t, reminding it of purpose, meaning. The bones […]
On a whim, we drove to Vegas and lost everything but the three-fifty stashed in the glovebox for the breakfast buffet. The red pleather booths and geometric orange and brown pockmarked paint reminded me of the Sambo’s my dad used to love. I told you, and you snorted. “That place! They shut it down.” Your barrel chest, soft around the edges as it has always been, shook the warped linoleum […]
Together we make up one half of a set of quotation marks. Both bodies curved in, paired arcs, resting on the crux of back to chest contact, we create an opening: here, your breath asserts don’t worry to my left ear inhaling whispers, she’ll never know at hairs on the nape of my neck. Exhale, it could always be like this. Turning towards you, I transform us […]
Palms flat across the cover of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady, I press down hard on the neatly tucked edges. Here, finesse is key as is timing and picking a book large enough to contain the blossom. Petals fanned out, pale-pink filaments and pistils— I open and close, swipe and smooth a few times to even the press. Likewise, your hands ease me shoulder then […]
The world can be correctly described using various concepts of “the existence of something.”— Eli Hirsch If we have souls they are probably in our hands I said peering into my beer bottle. The floor leaned and you tilted your head that you heard me, drank the last sip of your beer, and sloppily spun me on my barstool. I slammed my shot of tequila forgetting the salt and […]
This might have been a love poem but a phrase stumbled, wiped out a whole line. It glanced away, distracted by a muscular policeman just as it stepped from the curb, and found itself sitting in a parking lot bruised and slightly bloodied, propped against a rusted Honda. When strangers offered aid the poem became surly, churlish; it had prepared for tenderness and passion: dressed in his favorite color, donned […]
Let me tell you something about your son. He misses you. You may know that. I’ve no idea of consciousness besides my own. He misses you so much he sees you alive maybe on an island where you washed up when your boat went down. Maybe you crawled up from the detritus and dead cod and became king of some unmapped Viking island in the North Atlantic. […]
He called her Rhon-diful before the lovemaking because, well, she was Beau-tiful. No lightbulb went off. Maybe it was his good looks or, with heated and/or cooled cupholders, the Escalade. If he’d turned the corner a few times, she’d seen the blackboard ahead. That warning was like a chalked dead-body swinging from every streetlight and stop sign: Rhonda, Run Like a Rabbit. But faster. Of course, she didn’t see anything. […]
I’m Rodin’s Thinker—Le Poète— beside you, full of scotch and silent curses on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library (between the columned facade). I am crying a Fare-You-Well brushstroke. You are dying, no longer the Juicy Fruit of any young boy’s eyes, no Blake’s Lily in my poems. You aren’t going to pirouette on your toes for me tonight, be anyone’s pop-bottle in the orchestra or balconies. Maybe you smell […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 