Talking shit in footsy PJs — same old surreal kitsch about Himmler’s poison teeth,
Stalin’s spiked lawns, Magen David’s Krakow bagels, that Astaire had been born
Frederick Austerlitz, was Auschwitz the only camp which concentrated on tattoos?,
what a gas chamber music is!, Theresienstadt’s Potemkin village where flower boxes
resembled eye lashes, John Kerry’s Jewish roots, failed common noun wars on cancer
porn typhus terror drugs — blinged alpha shmucko nosey cocaine + croissant grabbers
packed like herring or black sheep who sleep standing near their pickled toy bears, lace
up chimney sweep hoodies, pinched sweat pants, abandoned happy hour drinking boots.
Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind
Requisite Gift Shop Refreshments Und Crucifix Über Alles
Oven Timer
A bakelite timer
forged
like a flocked hen
surveys the gas range
in this pre-war kitchen.
A mahogany biddy
that clucks off seconds;
fat bantam
of the dinner hour.
Our broody Buckeye
orbits,
a bell suspended
in her belly.
See her
pea comb, rosy
as the errant pearl
of blood
that punctuates an egg.
November
The sky grays into the same
smudged fingerprint.
The heat kicks on. Soon the skin
by my thumbnail will crack.
The moon will stick
to branches without leaves.
Loneliness
is the rain that falls all day.
we know how it is with windows
how that night
mother opened them and slept
heard girls singing // to each other in the olive trees
heard her own lung // gnawing its way through rib
crawling along the blue walls // out into the miracle
of the night’s only wolf // and waking
how she could only // breathe half the air // speak
half the words she knew // a beast born to beasts
into a morning black and hot as a rabbit’s womb
into a shirt pressed wet against her skin
Dear Trud,
To empty at / the bursted pollen, onto unevenly lit slabs,
head filled / with shade, how a currency of years in space
to close performances / attached. My hid specified from
work / & uninvolved in shippings of myself, less amid body,
my inventory / omits over counted shadows. It was warm
where you wane certain to / obsolete, still your earth tells
me that some proximity sifts / us through breaking grades.
Grace
The best grace falters is true twice.
The stammer in conceit delights.
Wonder is a perfect drunkard.
Practicing in Snowshoes
Focus your gaze
on fur rippling
around your vision
Heels press down
ovals of ash-splint
sinew underfoot
Mittens, boiled wool
caked in white crust
fingertips burning—
Stone chapel, closed
c’est L’eglise
the arched red door
Look up; snowflakes—
they drift in,
settle on your boots
Mole
mother made of moles
hereditary cluster discolor
my back but she
stepped on another crack
vertebra snap clenched
wineglass my mother stole
my mirror for her scratching
post my next lover pocked
with fingerholes tears
in the corners of my mouth
babies in my teeth is every
shame sexual knees between
tall grass many organs
mutate father in his fist coat
wiping oil under
the archway caged bear I
revere claw luck talon
tuck Is it strange
for me to tell you
to make it hurt?
so big this deep reeling,
and no place to put
it there was a wall I once miss find in difference over
ice and sweet easy
I hope I do I disappoint you
again and again and in seen through the straw
green fix at the site
of my legs in a towel
the gnawing has nowhere to climb anymore please
a million need looks confirm sea in me
five fragments
from selections
§XXV: |
an encomium for |
§XX: |
i met u on the coast & u vibrated elegiac couplets for a monaulous like |
§XXIX: |
a pall of spondees & trochees |
§LXIII: |
witnesses stand the coast breaking texts healthy growth blow the foam ribs |
§III: |
o, the tips of the & when you look back |