| I saw him ..........around the crook of the cape thousands of Iceland Poppies, pistil whipping, fizzing the brewing water with bubbly calyx, some matrix Ceremony for the ogler ..........No rain. ..Not even one plantain. Toxic wind in the dunes. Want hissing like his gnarled brown hands petting tobacco leaves, better wear your sundress buttoned up, this guy will rustle you up like a cow. This stranger better kept unkempt on the wrong side of a pistol, left to a rumpled county gunslinger itching for a brawl who’d be the only one to murmur mutinous drifter ..........But here you are, tousled and impaled, sucking silence and picturing some mink-eyes wet with downpour hallucinating me. |
vinegar-girls-to-women won’t hire me --later, in the street, the rain is waiting in your laps. You’re the composers of burred sleepless decades of days traipsing for work without a stiff handshake, of pastures erased into earth without an Iris rainbow— kitten-heels that’ve had it by the Copley Square lions. Your hands are already protesters knotting below sea level. Still full rasp-berry lips— --much later, the stars are waiting. I will wait you out. I won’t go home, won’t get on the subway, not at this hour, no, you can’t make me. Otherwise almost summer— compass roses orbiting don’t-walk signs, meeting secretly in rain gutters. Today you complete another vicious cycle tragically corkscrewing into libraries, cafes, and the River Charles. The question of tragedy as you question my face, beat me quickly, leave through the third rail. You see, I make you myth....I’ve forgotten you already— The answer to beauty is truth. Still whitetail deer legs and eyes— A bandage, bartenders and whiskey, two pretty men stacked by the back door smoking. To be separated. Off-stage, beauty blanketed, almost ruined, replicated in the mirror, please wash your hands. Posted, lovewords......healed fire ....men with jobs, in their play I become normal. |
| my sundress - my self You swallow me up and my sun dress always biased and flirty, falling. Cotton branching, lycra loosening, many evil-eyes, blanching, clenching. Many enviers envying my plastic ghetto stars & my face around the goblin-folder trimmed in cicatrix, lace lighters – tat,tat. Why compete with me? I’m Rapunzel with a short bob Just my dress rustling in some girl, just my dress spilling breath from my pen-i-tent-iary and then my dress airy and breathless on All my Children; one hit bleeds from my teeth. All the rancheros and wall-streeters line up to screw gorgeous cotton mouth to fill jugs with water - Llena mi jarra de agua, fill their mouths with their fists. All girls green as geckos line up ferocious in firespray, with shreds of my hair on their toes. My grief ghosts on the goblin folder they just tussled from me. I don’t know what to do about envy, transparent girls with no eyelids, knives they lick to clean. Durable cotton, durable girl. No sabía cómo llenar las tardes. Not once do I wince. I am dead. |
Sevenling - banana works He comes home from the Banana Works eyes yellow as a Palm Warbler, hard to believe, but to be so happy, a father must be real, which leads me to believe his tsip, chip barely makes it out of his throat but anything’s possible in Seaford/Oyster Bay, that forensic father leaning there against the willow whispering how beautiful is the daughter who runs to meet me in the dark kitchen, fiber-evidence to leave my fishing boat forever and count bananas and daughters among reasons to tail-wag and cast my net back to work. |