Driving, Not Speaking
the way doubt
sits in your eyes
like a flat left
front tire
waiting for me
to rummage around
in the trunk
for a spare whisper
of encouragement
a tire iron
of hope
the way doubt
sits in your eyes
like a flat left
front tire
waiting for me
to rummage around
in the trunk
for a spare whisper
of encouragement
a tire iron
of hope
On birch bark,
with chicken bone shards
dipped in a pot of moth wing dust:
an ink only visible near bioluminescent seaweed.
I’ll roll and slip them into glass capsules
and load these onto hummingbirds’ backs.
You’ll know my words have reached you
when the wingbeats fill your ears,
and you’ll learn that love
sounds a lot like a lawnmower.
ocean ellipsis mouth
we catch ourselves
a grumble in the time gap
maw’s energetic swallow
her beast, her quickening
where were all the murderous
bowlegged dangers i avoided
rollerskating down Mermaid Avenue
back when tides washed the back legs of youth’s agency
there in the subatomic catacomb
an organism of prisms
sold in the back junk shops
i washed my poverty in anonymous
erotic paperbacks i washed
my ideas about poverty through
the camera’s ground glass
the smiling was a circle
i swung to – the sun
beat the boardwalk and its
nostalgic catastrophe of magics
a map of gaslight gutter
rainbows i followed to the sea
The words return,
fold over and begin anew,
a shrouded spring
enveloping mockingbirds
in shaded trees
who curse their surroundings
in alternate rounds, as if fighting with the dawn.
Their tune’s timbre
recasts yesterday and all tomorrows
as a graveyard of upended trees.
Soon, all creatures bent on survival
will throb with the song suspended
in the thick of the forest
that dies by the dawn’s first light.
Wagner Castings Co., 1994
It was all golden air and sepia pavement,
gray smoke blooming from industrial stems.
Fly ash flecked parking lot air, drifting black
snow. Smell of melting rubber and brushfires.
I thought the world would always be that way:
low rumbling machinery, conveyer belts spun
thin, cracks spreading like thickening veins,
distant voices spilling from doors opening
and closing like wings, soot stained hands
clapping shoulders covered by gritty cotton.
See this Lithuanian woman. She has been
feeding my father dinners of mashed turkey
and broccoli, potato pancakes, washing his
clothes, bathing him, offering him the choice
between Wolf Blitzer and Vanna White for years.
Observe her hands as they gently push his body
to the side of the hospital bed. They are covered
with latex gloves. Consider the way she has taught
me to tenderly pull up his socks and cover him
with a quilt, put drops in his eyes, rub powder
on a rash, splash his neck with Old Spice, then
bend down to kiss his cheek goodnight.
You must come closer, you must hang up your jacket,
be prepared to spend hours listening to his slurred
speech, help feed him applesauce with vitamins,
raise and lower his bed, monitor his erratic heartbeat.
Remember what he has given up—his Buick LeSabre,
his cane, his walker, then finally his wheelchair, to get
to where he now lives—a bed with guard rails.
Go to the night-stand and offer him a Frango Mint,
put on his favorite Garrison Keillor CD. Listen as he
smiles with his one good eye and whispers something
so faint, you ask him to repeat, “I’m lucky.”
Think about all this while driving the long way home.
You may get angry at the world, like I do, until you
see your husband asleep in the Lazy-Boy, bare
legs dangling. Until you suddenly realize what the caregiver
has taught you as, without a word, you slowly rub lotion
onto your husband’s chapped heels, then cover his ice-cold feet.
after Night of the Rats by Mark Andres
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my sleep—[/one_sixth][one_sixth]it makes me[/one_sixth]fall down.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my jazz[/one_sixth][one_sixth]how it [/one_sixth]croons & whistles.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my lover’s [/one_sixth][one_sixth]spirit[/one_sixth]boogie.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]buildings[/one_sixth][one_sixth]in me[/one_sixth]crumble.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]music stand;[/one_sixth][one_sixth]holy[/one_sixth]talent-hands.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]marquis,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]scarlet[/one_sixth]velvet.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]humble[/one_sixth][one_sixth]ladder[/one_sixth]chair.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]moon who’s[/one_sixth][one_sixth]breathing[/one_sixth]fire.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]aspect:[/one_sixth][one_sixth]slow burn[/one_sixth]in glass.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]you who[/one_sixth][one_sixth]leave me[/one_sixth]undisturbed.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]perturbs me[/one_sixth][one_sixth]with lights[/one_sixth]and brushes.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]neighbor’s[/one_sixth][one_sixth]voice[/one_sixth]aflame.
[one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]ivy[/one_sixth][one_sixth]razes[/one_sixth]my house.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]the rivulets;[/one_sixth][one_sixth]sacred[/one_sixth]the leaves.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]portal[/one_sixth][one_sixth]like[/one_sixth]half-lidded eye.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the dust motes.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the grace notes.
[one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the blue jay’s dark shoulders+++++in myth.
1.
You get in the car and I know
you have something to tell me,
not because I see the unspoken
pooling in the curve of your eye,
but because I feel you not speaking.
2.
Afterwards we lie in bed, your head
cradled beneath my clavicle; you say,
What did you just think about?
Why?
The rhythm of your heartbeat changed.
I reach to pull you closer, but closer
no longer translates in our new language.
3.
We both understand
that the blue herons
around my lake and your dock
can hear me thinking.
Two thousand miles between
me and your downward spiral,
weeks before I’ll see you again
when a heron lands
two feet away from you,
spanning the dark distance for us.
4.
In the quantum world,
scientists perform experiments
on the crystalline structure of water:
shouting at one container for a month,
saying thank you, I love you to another,
ignoring the third.
Under the microscope, changed expressions—
exposure to negative thoughts forms
dull, incomplete, asymmetrical patterns;
exposure to loving words creates
brilliant, complex, snowflake patterns.
5.
2014 was the southeast’s second
wettest year since record-keeping began.
In California they continue to have
the worst drought in modern history;
I am saturated; you are flammable.
The dog sniffs a fire hydrant.
The son shoots baskets until dark.
The grass is sharply edged along the sidewalk.
It takes only a moment for the man
to forget he is father, husband,
for his wife to become stone.
He clenches his fist, brings back his arm,
as though winding up for a pitch.
The driveway is swept clean.
Moths dart around the porch light.
Dirt spills from the planter.
The son runs away.
The sky fractures.
Fruit hangs low on the plum tree.
With a red pen,
the disease draws
inside my abdomen
a chain of volcanoes
erupting on cue
and rivers of lava
sliding across organs,
then hardening into rock,
traces on my ovaries
silhouettes of faces
that will never be,
scrawls on my uterus
infinity symbols.
The disease takes
years to gestate.
The disease claims
dominion over me,
makes me an accomplice.
two months at best
the doc said,
and we went home…
—in drowning rain
—in pregnant silence
—in circular, useless thought
* houseplants *
* houseplants *
* houseplants *
(need watering)
and we’re still out of milk…
‘better remember to—
oh!
a new lymphatic system!
you need
a new lymphatic system, too…
‘missing red lights
that beamed like
land bound sentinels
worn-out
windshield wipers
smearing grey horizon
over everything
. choking view .
obscuring doorways
faceting teardrops
blurring petals
of withered African violet
(the one in the foyer)
(the one that’s been there as long as I’ve known you)
(the one that needed watering sooner)
leaves falling
like fuzzy rain…
like two months left
to live
(at best)
The air is thick with ambivalence.
The residue of those both forgotten and pushed away.
A watchtower too certain of its own authority.
The slow grating of a mechanical door granting
one passage in and out of the yard.
The dull gray of clothing rendering life
invisible against a backdrop of concrete walls.
Barbed wire coils itself precariously
around the edges of the prison.
It can be difficult to tell what they are trying
to keep in and what they are trying to keep out.
Chain linked fences standing upright as soldiers do.
Only what they are told,
only what they have convinced themselves
they have been built for.
But is anything built for what it ultimately becomes?
Stripped of any agency it might have had,
when this steel was melded into a false deity,
a pretense of human control,
did it dream of what else it could have been?
The wheels of a child’s first bicycle.
The monkey bars from which they would swing
to and fro.
The car a family drives on cross-country road trip
filled with laughter
and fighting
and spilled ketchup across the floor.
When did it learn it was to become a cage?
But how can a cage become a refuge?
A circle of men swallowed
by the world’s indifference.
Where the totality of their personhood
has been diluted to a single act.
That they have become singularly defined
by the worst thing they’ve ever done.
We don’t remember they are brothers,
husbands, fathers, friends.
We don’t remember that they are people
worth remembering. But their writing is a declaration
of all that makes them whole.
A classroom of men who refuse to forget themselves.
Each word provides the sort of liberation
a parole board can never grant.
So often they write about their family,
their children.
How they want them to remember
their father as the man whose laugh
would turn a room into a festival of rapture.
How he would read them stories before
they fell asleep to a world that didn’t always
make sense, but always made sense
in his arms.
It’s the sort of thing that reminds them
that they once existed beyond this place.
That they still do.
In the middling Alabama
unpopular girls grow tall
and firm given the cover
of hundred-foot magnolia
tree towers. Given limbs
too thick to rustle, betray,
or give a girl away. Make
it so you can never look
up and say it wasn’t me.
Never say you are not
the girl who wobbled
into magnolia arms
weeping. Tears you
spilled in overturned
leaves. Fallen boats.
Like others, you grew
on iced-tea stories with
sprigs of mint. Slept in
silver moon puddles.
Fear a response to the
brilliant neon bibles
or anything that stood
between a girl and sky
she could see. Stars.
You grew an inch more
per annual ring. You grow
until the room key is a
bulge in pressed khakis.
A trinket for your thoughts.
One look from the eye
of a mounted stag
above the fireplace.
If monuments
are all that survive us,
if Palmyra,
dead for centuries,
is all that stands for beauty,
if, blind
to the blackened skies
and the savagery of an unmaking
the eyes of a statue
call to us,
if the Aramaic of ruins
speaks to us
like no mother tongue
nor parched throats
of orphans have,
if a hunger stirs in each of us
for a temple
empty of worship,
if our pulse quickens
for the ghost of Zenobia’s gowns,
her diaphanous gaze,
while the living,
knee-deep into their deaths
in smoldering cities
in boats dissolving in the sea
in swollen bellies of refugee camps,
if all that breaks our hearts is
yesterday,
and the silent colonnade
anticipating
the dynamite,
if all we love
is a lost world
then let the dust
swallow our names
let the maps
beneath our feet
burn.
If all we are is past,
who are these millions
now
gasping for air?
(1)
When sleep comes the cortège stops by cairns,
tugs the silver cord, nearly always with ravens.
Only here, snapped back to white chairs, dew,
do I recover details—umbrella faces,
black suits, cousins, hatchbacks, clunk shut.
A day off school, same uniform, blazer apt.
Puce curtains close. Organ music. Brother’s hand
round my elbow. His only touch, never since.
Curtains shut, hymn books, mahogany pews,
priest’s robe. I knew nothing of the electric trolley,
nothing of the antechamber, ID tag, oven,
adjustment of gas, spray to prevent flashbacks;
nothing of the raking of ash, how it’s
the thigh-bone, the skull, that remain as cakes.
Uncle cowed by the casket, looking once, not long;
there scorched, already, the after-image.
(2)
Waking—on the wall, the hospice, curious
how they got her ring off, who that was, the ring
that dug its way in, what marriage meant. She said
they’d have to amputate, was the only way.
Who kept the book of condolence, sent light
to career through catkins, starring the eiderdown?
Her thoughts mended, there to remember us
by. She must hold this smile, her favourite
of three. Or might she actually forget?
As she went of course through walls, up and out.
I asked such naive questions, and was shown
a red admiral moored on a Volvo. ‘She’s there
returned.’ So soon, I thought. And what of us,
that limitless repertoire of love, was it stored
under antennae?, or was it circling somewhere
close?, or, unsaid till now, lost with her warmth.
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