You hang the candy cane on the lamp. Lick what melts. Now you’ve ruined the bulb, poisoned your room with burnt sugar smoke. You’ve blamed your brother for dumping all the easy-bake cake mix in cocoa heaps on the floor, for fingers squeezed between hinges on your wooden door, and for stolen cherry bombs under the bed. Three out of four fit a pattern. Years later you think of your dollhouse plates that went missing, don’t remember him smashing the Shaker dining table, or if the rugs were painted on the floor. You only recall having the house, the smell of splintered balsam and glue, that it was tornadoed somehow, blown-away.
Archives for April 2016
Red Dot at Target
Disconsolate tyke, wriggly little urchin.
I let her pick her pinkening scabs.
When she pricked my cheek,
I tweezered out the keratin,
occasioning a bloody show.
Posparto already,
depleted, sorely lacking,
and here’s a laser
sighting me at the bodice.
Where have you gone,
my lumpen and impish scamp?
Mark me on my knees now,
forsaken and zeroed between empty shelves.
Monday in a Nutshell
You play one last note on the quiet Wurlitzer,
yielding to the murmur of distant whales
near the beach, and I pray to Buddha
hummingbirds will revel in the sand.
The smell of cabbage drifts into the parlor.
I wipe the marble counter and shut
the oven door, flashing the calico and tuxedo
a honeyed smile. You and I flirt
during the drive to work, on our elevator ride.
Coil against each other like contented snakes.
While the clocks hide in the bottom
drawers, we prowl the office all day,
selling every stock in sight
after we kiss each other’s noses for luck.
II. Maytree & I take our first veterinary exam
Post-Anatomy came
celebratory Sweet Water where
his bottom lip’s a snapshot
the shade of rhomboids on
an embalmed cat’s corpse that we
studied for weeks
& his voice
licked a blackberry bush that stung like
Doveak’s prophecy that Negro melodies
would be the basis for American music—
but he could never have foreseen
our jazz on gold sheets like Ellington
translated into something you could wrap
in fingers from his huge palms, those
stilled metronomes gone post-sex sedentary,
sat braided with mine on his sternum while
my bottom lip brushed his left nipple:
nerve center of my enterprise.
from Notebook: New Mexico
January 2016, Highway 20, Mile Marker 39
Close enough to see
the mountains
have shaped the clouds.
Anthophobia
It is almost spring in the asylum
by the olive groves. Once I saw a dog
the color of a wedding train
eat the newly planted daffodil
bulbs but slept through its
vomit. The next day the gardener
found the streaks of a sixteen-wheeler
between its eyes, a staggering promise.
If I’d known I would’ve
clutched a bayonet and
circumcised the moon.
Today, the lobes of tulips
wave dreamishly towards my
sill like virginal bells, and the
anger pulls and closes
like cat gums on nip.
Materials & Properties
Skyscrapers whirligig Boeing 747s away like maple seeds
while nothing grenades down Fifth Avenue, clouding our lungs with emphysema’s
ghost. The new materials, tenfold stronger than steel,
taken out of service for how it wrinkles, then fails at twelve-hundred degrees.
Angels dance on neon atoms of gussets & trusses we print
from the nobler elements. Admiring our construction’s spinoid,
novel geometries, representatives from the class of arachnae
sigh, get on the horn, inform spiders everywhere they can cease weaving silk.
Snow flakes, unsurprising to us now, melt.
Ten years & nary a fire catches the new boughs, jumps a break,
or burns the mountain down. Come, speaking after me: Love Thy Properties.
Come, see what’s under the hood, what new engines purr.
Breaking the Rules
Tell me Never use ‘blue’ in a poem, Never
step in the same river twice. Blue Creek
straddles two seasons, rime white as blued laundry,
rimming rocks, bluets scattering the verge.
Rounding the curve of slough, the crack of ice—
one loud boo to a single dipper, feathered
slate-blue and hopping upstream. She starts,
rises up into the blue morning.
Driving Through West Virginia
What I thought was mountain
was cloud,
what I thought cloud
was mountain.
The old travel out of desire,
the young travel
out of need.