Century

One hundred years ago, I kissed you. I am ruined. What good is my life now, without your lips? Once, I could suck the juice of pomegranate or lick the ice from the edges of a thistle. Now, my lips remember nothing. My tongue sleeps fitfully in my mouth, awaiting your return. Can I sail the black lakes of time? Traverse starlight and shatter moonbeams to retrieve that kiss? One hundred years ago, your fingers lingered around my neck, tracing a strand of kisses you’d left there. Today, I raise a stole of fox around my shoulders & hang in an eternity of longing.

A Rose from Roger

I have a rose from Roger, and Linda loves him. 

The cats rendezvous on the rug. I pose before the rose, 

before the mirror in dusky candlelight,  

my waist is disappearing. 

There is a month’s worth of daily news

 stacked by the fireplace. I burn it—a sacrament. 

Dumb words to poems— Smart words to fire—

the being inside me tumbles. The cats murder the garbage, 

devouring its heart like fresh kill. I’m strange. 

I’m wonderful. March is a wet lion on the lamb. 

I stand before the lit rose, the lit mirror, to view pendulous 

vein laced breasts, scary-mother-earth-tits. The baby counts

my ribs. The Peace Lily blooms. Vacuuming, I recall 

Roger’s rosebud mouth kissing petals, sipping ambrosia 

as if I were tit and he, babe. Roger saying, “How did that felt?” 

Roger saying, “Roger is complicated peoples.” I ask him to say, 

“Take out the garbage,” in French, and he does. Valentine, 

the rose you left presses open in the night glow. Its secret escapes 

into the evening air. Yesterday’s lovers fade. One leaves the words 

of a foreign tongue, another’s tiny-self lingers bearing the lessons of love.

Madonna and Child

A baby’s skull is soft, 

shaped by its passage through 

the narrows of the vagina. 

Picture the cone-headed baby Lord, 

bald and wailing for his mother’s breast. 

Where was Jesus better loved than 

where he was formed, 

in the womb of his mother?

Yes to Ghosts

Lingering on the shoulder
Candles on gray days
The green of rain
Yes to immortals who love me
Stroke my hair – think they made me
Yes to divine intervention
Divine anything—

Flying if only in dreams

Yes to the burning effigy
to voodoo and charka

Yes, I say Yes

In the Eighties (Appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine Summer 2005)

for Leornard Michaels 

    

     I married my landscaper husband Bertin the Eighties and moved from urban Dayton, Ohio, to grassier Connecticut. We purchased a small Cape Cod home in the not so grassy Naugatuck. I began to long for familiar friends and family. 

    I auditioned for a production of Orwell's 1984 at a local college. I felt surrounded by thought-police. Television became increasingly disturbing. Ron Reagan was President. I developed a fear of nuclear war. This began a protracted bout with insomnia and inebriation. Within six months, I knew my marriage was a mistake. I thought a child would change things; fortunately, efforts to this end failed. 

    I enrolled in classes to finish the degree in Journalism I'd started eight years before. There, I made friends in the theater club and the school paper. We rehearsed nights and laid out the paper weekends. I wrote dozens of two-column-inch random news bits and one scathing article that ruined the career of a drunken professor. 

    My friends were colorful: sexually, racially, and morally diverse. They were bored. They were people whose marriages were failing. People who planned to make it big someday were smarter than those "dumb-asses" who got degrees in business management and jobs after graduating. We'd go to the pub after rehearsals or when an issue went to print, drink steins of beer and artfully sniff cocaine from restroom toilet tanks. Empty conversations filled empty corners. We made Mecca of Greenwich Village. We were very cool. 

    I met a sculptor who carried a weapon. He feared a conspiracy, believing the government planned to eliminate the proletariat. I knew the proletariat didn't matter to the government. Locally renowned people attended my parties. A woman named Olivia stripped in my living room and later gave blowjobs in the basement. I wanted to be tolerant and open. I needed the excitement of an edgy lifestyle to balance the blandness I felt deep in my gut. 

    My Journalism professor was a smart, good-looking lesbian who had a lover and the acceptance of her family and friends. She blew a vein in her neck with a needle full of heroin. I changed my major to theatre. 

    I worked for an insurance firm that underwrote drunk drivers at deadly rates. I typed carbon forms and collected checks. My coworkers were a single mother and a drying-out widow with big hair. Our gender and need for cash united us. Each day we watched anxious people wander into the backroom with wads of green. 

    I directed a play for the drama club. Dozens of people auditioned. They traipsed across the stage and read snippets of text. One cried real tears. Another fled behind the curtains and vomited. At first, I took a lot of notes to help me remember people. Then, hours later, I made little up or down arrows next to names. A local paper canned the production. The nineteen-year-old lead of the play told Alan, the stage manager, that I was narrow-minded and artistically challenged. She said I couldn't direct my way out of a paper bag with scissors. The reviews in the school paper were favorable. Half of the people on the masthead were also in the cast. 

    In the Eighties, I made the best friends and worst enemies I've ever had. Some are still partying; others have gone on to more ordinary life. I told Bert I wanted a divorce while sitting at our kitchen table. He cried and explained that divorce was a sin. He was worried about his salvation, not mine. I was over any God's watching motivation for my life choices. 

    In the eighties, I used illicit drugs in public places. Drugs and alcohol made things messy. People overdosed. They accidentally had children. I believed that drugs helped conversations, conducting hubris chats with anyone about new music, the existence of God, or whether there was a gene for homosexuality. When gay cancer appeared, my friends were straight, gay, and curious. La Cage Aux Folles was on Broadway. There was a firestorm of homophobia from the religious right. My nose was broken in an automobile accident and has a little crook in it since. I developed bleeding ulcers. I was a nervous wreck. My husband moved out. I came to believe God was a woman. I shunned tradition and made sketch plans to join a commune one. I slept with people who were somewhere on the grayscale of addiction. I should have been raped, murdered, overdosed, and found wrapped in the sheets of my perpetually unmade bed. 

    One afternoon I lazed around my newly listed house with my friend Alan. We talked about Warhol and Sexton. We gossiped and got drunk waiting for our dates. And when they arrived, we all climbed into bed, three men and me. All we could do was giggle. After taking off all of his clothes, Alan vomited and then went into the living room and passed out on the couch. I hid in the bathroom and phoned my mother in Ohio. We talked about her garden. It was comforting to hear about aphids and evening primrose. I crept out of the bathroom to find all three men gone. 

    The drama of theatre arts continued. I was accepted to a campus theatrical troupe called The Central Players. Victor Dini, the faculty advisor, said I showed promise. He was semi-famous once, off-off-Broadway. The entire art department admired him. He taught me to work with an intention. I chewed the scenery as Mona in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Because of an interest in cell mitosis, I took a botany class. When I answered a difficult question in her lecture, Dr. Green, my professor, bent toward me and asked, "What is your major?" "Theatre," I said. After that, she never called on me again. She thought I was only acting like I knew something about science. 

    I was given the lead in a one-act play. A cast member gave me a gram of coke on opening night. I delivered my monologue in record time with edgy emotion. A playgoer later told me that my twitchy ways gave the character authenticity. My classmates were younger than me. They lived with their parents. None were exceptionally talented, but they believed they had a chance. They forgot they were in a play at a state university. Their parents paid for expensive voice lessons, wardrobes, nose jobs, and most of the drugs we used. I became jaded. Our lines kept us up all night. My friends thought I was cool for an older person. I was in my late twenties. 

    Many gifted and not-so-gifted people I knew in the Eighties are dead or worse. Four were killed in a drunken car accident the year I graduated. One is a homeless meth addict in Portland. Two died from complications related to AIDS. The guy who had the part of Jimmy Dean pumps gas and rebuilds engines at a local service station. 

    In the Eighties, I wrote dark poetry reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, I thought. I used to believe I'd write a hit screenplay about my reckless years in the Eighties. I hadn't divorced. We couldn't afford an attorney. So I took a job on the graveyard shift as a waitress at the Simsbury Diner. I poured coffee and served eggs to drunks and truckers until dawn. Benny, the Syrian owner, said that I had to be nice if I wanted tips. He suggested I unbutton my top a little. He'd scream, "Pick up! Pick up!" or "Monkey Dish! Monkey Dish!" in his thick accent while standing over the grill, his glasses and hair coated with grease, sweat, and flour. I saw Les Miserables on Broadway, an elaborate production that nightly evoked tears from the audience. I saw Jefferson Airplane on the midway. Grace squawked White Rabbit to an audience of aging teenagers. I met Peter, Paul, and Mary backstage at the Melody Tent on Cape Cod. I visited the Hillstead, Mary Cassatt paintings hung in a white bedroom with ivory linens and gauzy curtains. And in the darkened parlor—Monet's Haystacks hung in gilded frames around a sitting area. After this visit, I went to a matinee showing "She's Gotta Have It." It was a day of great dichotomy: Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, and Spike Lee. 

    Friends lived in NYC, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the West Coast. They also lived in the psych wards and halfway houses. I did the electric slide in high heels at a dance party in Hartford to raise money for the Arts Council. A new poet signed her book for me. She was dating a locally elected official. The three of us sniffed coke from the glass tabletop on the torch-lit patio. Violin music wafted through the air. He's now serving a ten-year term on corruption charges. I don't know if she still writes. I met other writers and political mucky-mucks who've since disappeared. Today, other than voting, I avoid politics and poetry. 

    One night, Alan drank so much Vodka it caused him to seize on my living room floor. He was making the cross over from happy drunk to mean drunk. He fell to the floor in the middle of a dramatic argument about his car keys. I watched him writhe around and drool. When he came to, the paramedics were working on him. At first, he refused treatment. He didn't believe he'd had a seizure, "It was just a little black out," he said. Then, when blood trickled down the side of his face from a gash on his forehead, he was convinced. He swilled his last Vodka sans tonic and was carted away in an ambulance. He'd been drinking for thirty years and had the weathered look of a writer who lived near the ocean. He signed into the drunk tank. While visiting him in the hospital, I described every terrible detail of the event. The part about drooling and his eyes rolling into white appalled him. He never drank again. He wasn't as messed up as other people I knew in the Eighties. 

    In December 1989, a friend from work's son was expelled from middle school. He was HIV positive. Before that, I didn't know Ronnie was sick. A few days later, I joined a vigil to protest his banishment. Folks gathered on the New Haven green. There were people using wheelchairs, bikers, families, clergy. Fat snowflakes sailed among us, and we batted them with mitten-ed hands and caught them on our tongues. Some of the sick were bald, thin as rails. Some seemed healthy as oxen, beautiful children with sarcoma on their faces. People waved flags silk-screened with the faces of loved ones who could not be with us. A woman hurried by, pulling her children closer. Dissenters kept an anxious distance. We lit our white utility candles, our collective flames glowing in the thinning wintry light.

Starlet

Girl in the nighttime of her attic bedroom…squirrels scratch inside walls, and hot cats give infant wails to the summer streets below her darkened window. Under the starlit noise, five great hands rise from a floor of clouds…in the center of each hand is a twinkling gem. These hands stand, palms to palms. They are four times the size of the girl. Together they bend open like soft-lit flower petals. The girl is so young, just a child from her attic bedroom. So enchanted, she walks the clouded floor. She is a toy ball taken, a soap bubble blown, a blue egg found, beating. Thrust under by the praying hands, under the expanse of shimmering clouds. She floats the breath of infinity, the sac of waters, and vessel-ed radiance.

Birthday

Epidurals fail
Cipher the circumference
of his head.
The answer is worrisome.
Anointed into the unimaginable
emergence of life through vagina.
A graphitic history
left behind on fleshy 

walls with tags painted 

inside. Seen a corpse 

when breath is briefly gone?
What of a son, a daughter
in that shadowed instance 

before breath has come along?
A fish flopped from water—
blue screaming into pink—
and legend and myth,
a child, a child.

appeared in the spring 2008 issue of the Cafe Review

Crystal

My mythology is of aliens and angels,
large eyed, thin fingered beings
with winged souls whose light overwhelms.

You dwell with the shadow people
in the new kind of darkness,
with those people whispering in your ear,
but when you look, they disappear.

I am a soap bubble,
thin-skinned and full of wind,
an ocean of rainbows floats upon me.
Yet, I am almost nothing.

You’ve married madness,
a toothless wench full of riddles,
“This is the last time,” she murmurs
this promise over and over.

I sleep in a veil of sensuous dreams
and dwell in the garden.
You rock in a cradle of nightmares
and sleep in the desert.

The whole world went bad for you,
under the homeless bridge,
up from the battered dumpster,
You swallow the seed of despair.

Crystal transforms for you and I.
I cup my hands under the rainbow
it throws on the floor straining to lift it
for little Abigail.
I drop it again and again,
to the delight of her waiting toes.

An ill wind blew the bad stuff
into your lungs
and for the first time,
all your colors came to darkness
and you could not be healed.

Lost in Paradise

The afternoon daisy shivers 

Wander in the fallen leaves 

The wind has winter in its mouth 

The stars are mercury rolling 

Witness the graves 

The children abandoned in paradise 

weep among the bulrushes and tares 

amidst the star dust, 

on the eternal carpet,

at the throne of a man.

Appeared Spring 2008 in the Cafe Review

Experiment Number Five-forty-two

I knew this woman. Some called her contrary. She was my neighbor. I called her Mary. Bill called because Mary called him. She said, “I’m getting messages in my teeth; they’re after me and you, Bill.” 

    This woman I knew, Mary, mother of two, ex-wife of one, she called my brother and do you know what she said? She said, “Bill, you have to help me. The aliens are talking to me. The government is talking to me through my teeth. My divorce is final, and I’m making a crazy quilt. Oh yeah, and they said you’re next Bill.” 

    You see, Mary’s marriage was a good marriage. That is until she decided to improve upon it. Mary and Dave, Mary decided, needed therapy. Dave fell for the Therapist, and Mary got the kids. It was all a preparation, like the making of a quilt. Mary was textile, she was fabric, Okay—she was remnants, but she was a part of the plan. Hemmed in, you might say, you might say stitched up. 

    The children, you ask? Well, what about the children? They were boys, of course, miniature men, miniature Davids. And when they went to visit their Daddy and his Therapist for the weekend, the big David asked the little Davids, “How is your mother, Mary?” And they’d answer, “You know, Dad. She is acting kind of strange. She’s painting flowers on the porch floor. She’s hanging foil wallpaper in the foyer. She’s painting the woodwork, Dad.” “Frankly, Dad, I’m worried.” said the twelve-year-old little David. “Me too.” said the ten-year-old little David. “And furthermore, Dad, I think Mom is, well—She’s just not well. She’s nutty as hell—Dad, are we going to the movies? Will you buy me a Switch? Dad, will you take me? Will you take me? Can I live with you?” And the twelve-year-old little David said, “Yeah, Dad, me too.” 

    Dave went to a Judge and said, “Your honor, I knew this woman. I married her too. She was okay at first. Then she just kind of blew. I tried, sir. My Therapist tried too. And I don’t want my boys with her. And neither would you if you knew what I knew.” So Dave said, “You know Judge, she paints silly flowers on the floor of the porch, she grows herbs, Judge, and what’s even worse, when my sons come home from their school, she is dancing in the living room like a crazy fool, or else she is sewing a quilt. Look at her eyes, Judge. Do you see them say ‘tilt’?” 

    The Judge looked into the eyes of this mother of two. He said, “Okay, I’ve heard from him. Now let’s hear from you.” Mary said, “You know, Judge, I do this one stitch and looks like bird’s feet, or maybe claws. I’ve stitched is all using just that stitch.” and after a pause, she said, “I’ve stitched and stitched, like a mad quilting fool. The yellow is sewn and the orange too. I’ve not found it in me to sew up the blue.” The Judge said, “Mary,” in a most soothing voice, “I’ve got a tear in my robe, and I’m sure it’s your choice, but— will you sew it? Will you mend it for me? And, Oh, by the way, I’m giving David custody.” And Mary said back, in a yet milder tone, “I’ll be happy to sew it, Judge, sir. I’ll have lots of time. I’ll be all alone.”

    It was planned that way. I read the script. Planned and saved up for like next summer’s trip. The government planned it, the aliens too. They called it experiment-number-five-forty-two. And such a relief, they can control women, using only their teeth. I knew this woman. Her story is true. She stitched in all colors, green, red, yellow, and orange too, and at long last, she stitched up the blue.

The Impossibility of Crows

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens.
Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens,
for the heavens signify simply: The impossibility of crows.
Franz Kafka

Amid endless nothing,
formed by what it cannot be,
surrounded by eternity,
which falls,
into lungs and
up and out again.
Ascending to the end
of the endless sky,
which is blue,
only for light's sake,

black feather

Pillow Talk

Can’t free the art from
this circumstance.

God said, “Too much!”

Love made more of us
then we were.

An ant carried
a gigantic crumb
across the silk duvet.

Yariguies Brush-finch

I tie knots in a blue cord 

suck a black pebble 

and frieze your name 

in a firefly’s light. 

There are graves 

speckled with sea salt 

and burnt sage. 

I’ve exhausted fire 

and banishment. 

Shall I sing backward 

three words, three times,

run my fingers down my neck, 

forgetting yours? 

Naked I smudge and pray 

upon glowing beads, 

the waning gibbous 

on my brow, 

Venus in my right eye— 

A fragile heart beats 

sound inside 

new feather floats 

down to roots.

Appeared Spring 2008 in the Cafe Review

Vulture

Peace is the
dividing cell
ferocious in the marrow.
It coats the bullet,
cannot be marched to
with signs or weapons.
Peace is the vulture
loving the corpse,
the rising mist
on a mass grave.

It never left.
It pulses
under the noise,
Peace does.

We thought we
could name God.
And we did.
All of God’s names
are God’s names,
even the one
you cannot speak.

Like God,
Peace has every name we ever gave it.
It is upon the back of the cockroach.
Peace has always loved the shiny armor
of a cockroach.

appeared in Cafe Review Spring 2007

Dressed for the Market

In odd fantasies, I have imagined myself, 

sent through a handy-dandy gadget 

that makes Julian potatoes. 

Cross-sectioned me, a layer of adipose 

tissue, wrapped in ecto-endo-dermic 

cellophane and skin. A part of me slab-like, 

steak-like, marbled, with a plug of bone 

the dog would quite enjoy. Or possibly 

a breast section; mammary tissue resting 

upon one of the “C” shaped, paired, 

bony, or partly cartilaginous rods, 

that stiffen the walls of the body 

and protect the viscera. That “C” 

shaped gift from Adam, 

that cradles the central or innermost 

part, aortic pump-thing, 

which makes me tick. Or possibly 

a mid-section, with stomachic vessels 

feeding and maybe what my esophagus 

anteriorly communicated there; 

a late lunch or something swallowed 

when the pouch was new, which never did 

pass through; a 1959 penny or one of Mamma’s 

pearls which having rolled down my tongue 

is now forming an oyster in my stomach. 

And I have imagined further and odder still, 

the hands of friends, relatives, or strangers, 

selecting their sections. Stepping from the line, 

hoping for a choice cut of their choice. 

They point through the glass display at a pair 

of thigh pieces, meaty weighty cut from 

a big-boned girl. Me, slaughtered and dressed 

for the market, like the cow, you never knew, 

and so do not hesitate to ask the butcher to wrap.

Symbiosis

A red flower,
distracted by
a jet passing
over the sun,
bends down
to a motoring
hummingbird.

My Name

This is my name. Now quiet. This is. This is. Quiet now. Quiet now. Quiet now. My name is yours. I give you my name. My name is under my toenail. It is between my teeth. My name is mother-woman and I am larger than my name. My name is power. It is all the power of the unseen. It is all the power of void. My name is Isis. No. Inanna. No. Gwan Yin. No. Patricia. No. Julia. No. My name is unspeakable. Can you hear it above the cough, the bark, the water flow? My name is nothing and I am so much more than empty. I am more than missing. I am larger than black hole. My name is not yet and I am still waiting in the fluid sac. My name is missing. Who took it? Who took my name?

Apnea:

This poem
is a vanity: worse than lipstick.
Things are extraordinary.
The moon wanes.
A belly swells.

This poem is technical, yet angelic;
with the word apple in it;
and something about the blush of sleep.
This poem is crafty: a petite point.

It is structured in the breathless dream of night
where the sliver-moon sparks and magic
cells are stars dividing—
sailing in the void.

How Things Go in a Poem-Relationship

You are the Poem.

At first you are perfect.

I want to read you all night
– a love poem.

Next, I realize I’m naked.

And you are common,
anyone can have you
folded up in their pocket.

I leave you – unfinished.

The Human Element is Fire

He knew I'd
bring my knees together—
knew these lips
before they kissed trees,
spoke to mountains,
or belonged to another
continent.

And all the Gods were
Goddesses—

Dreamt:

We’re together in a dwelling appointed
with beautiful details
gilded dressers and marble floors.

In the sunlit grand hall,
I paint over a canvas of yours.

You walk away, wading across a shallow stream

and disappear into the copse
of the far shore,
waves rise and wash the feet
of my companion,
and my feet.

In the afternoon mansion,
a kitten head
tenderly mews on the
expansive turning staircase.

Heartbreaker

Janis went into hiding. 

Her hair cut in a bob. 

She wore pumps. 

And cleaned up—good. 

Janis went down 

to the basement laundry. 

She married a salesman 

who didn’t feel the way 

she felt. It didn’t matter

—much. Janis hid behind 

a baby belly. She smoked 

in secret and screamed 

at her cry-baby-kids 

a running-on-the-lawn. 

Janis lived in hiding. 

She went to cocktail parties. 

Her manicure looked natural. 

Her perfume spiced the air. 

She baked a clam dip. 

She worried about her weight. 

Channeling Janis. No one sees 

my drunken bounce off the walls 

of her psyche. They don’t hear 

her moan into the needle 

at the edge of identity. 

I’m a mother, a housewife. 

I’m Janis. Laundry—dive 

into the sheets of night. 

Dust—cough into a tragic 

cigarette. Breakfast—drowse 

in the shattered invisible— 

detach and linger—in the rafters. 

 Did I make you feel?

Cottage Names

I introduced her to Olga
saying, name the spider
and it won’t scare you anymore.
On the couch pillow,
face stung by the sun
and a kiss, Abigail slept
beneath the fluttering
wings of the bat
she’d named Carlos.

Regret

He climbed down
from the boards.

Someone whispered
passionate prayers.
Someone slept nearby
— contentedly.

God became a man
in each respect.

Out on the stoop,
the boy she means to stir
gleams by—narrowly.

“Eat me,” he says.