5 Poems


Get Him Chromogenic

Part of ramping up is to adopt a thick gold tooth.  I met my current lover in second grade: green gloves, slim legs folded, a same-sex mouth down-turned with plunging neckline.  A pomegranate is also bright red.  A large percentage of the world’s best-selling novels consist of women standing in rows of fresh cut flowers. I’m wearing a black brassiere; I met my lover in an elevator. A woman doing yoga is not unlike an object. Most aggressive acts of household violence take place with rolling pins. Who will the young girl who runs like a greyhound become in fifteen years? Her hair is bright red; she drives in a sidecar; a knot streams behind her in the U.S. and Europe only.  If, on the other hand, she winds up naked in a cotton-covered bedroom, this image becomes a leaf-cutter ant.




I can’t be the only middle-aged, gowned socialite who grows a patch of skin. I injure the back of my head: it’s a knapsack, a generation of young men who moan for some time, then return their mother’s maiden names.   Wet carved wood figures split in many fields of labor.  The boy came to bed with four stuffed animals, and the sight was a definite pattern.




Once, a telephone dressed up in human hair.  Then physical power, a milkmaid: the only family young enough to bear a symbol of cashmere and teeth.





Laughing Sideways

How did an unsanitary
    joke get me riled
up I fell down.  Plucking broccoli
    Why are you never nice to me?
I perceive things
    lonely in this cage, bored out of my mind.

Unlock the sink door where
    mouse once harvested dry
astronaut ice, our
    housecat’s noxious
feast: ocean white fish
    minced or sliced in gravy. Outside,
it’s raining
    But it’s constantly raining

Do you remember the last
    time rain molded biscuits
stale indoors?  
      The sun refuse

recoiling into the autobiography of a schoolgirl who, mischievous
    discovered an alleyway
close to home, pleading
    I want to take a vacation
But you always take vacation

someplace else, I stay inside
    indefinitely, unequivocally
larval without question
    asleep behind
hair color, general body type
    you cross out, I look in
away from time to time.




 
Temporary Insanity

Dressing for human absence might evoke a presence.
An antique oomph and whiskey bottle

painted grey I
flail a marble figure.  To

this rhetorical drunk still covered with manuscript
woefully bare

at the time of the author’s death, a pair
of discarded pantyhose and 10,000 shoes.





Walrus Live-In

I have never seen a walrus live in person

                  Who believes that
                  The solution to
                  the problem is

Am I thinking
of you now? 

               I am thinking of you
                                    less I thought

Am I thinking
of you more?

                      Sideview mirror
                                    absent, big truck
                            up &
                                    bust it.


When you walk
                         through the house,

You walk through
                        at least six

                       of you, all different
                       shapes &
                                       sizes tall.
                       One taller

But he is gone—& so we spend
the evening discussing

A number of options, three
                          of which

                                       I choose to divulge here.


 


A Better Ant Trap


It appeared that though the ants
    would interfere by causing
        greatest pain, abandoning
their nests for thirty & one

Days in
    wind, snow, rain,
        all ants are safe, barring 
the family.

Several times
    I have seen
        the ants
yawn, stick out their tongues 

In sleep like month-
    old babies in a gentle
        quivering motion.  I have also
noted their

Communal rhythmic
    journeys up the hill in close
        white heat carrying
long sticks, fine earth &

Larvae, a defective
        little mound
            one inch tall in dark
brown clay if you must    

Care to touch it?