is patience, an arithmetic of cat and mouse.
Don’t become disappointed: this thrill is
evergreen. Soon, you will be held captive, knock-kneed
with wanting. With enough practice, your mouth will fill
with the taste of almonds and milk, your breath will honey
with the rhapsody of absence.
You are strong enough to survive on vapor,
yet you feel a fresh collision beginning
within. When you find him, lost and gasping
in the coatracks, draw him in with your nectar.
You are still soft and ripe, a peach.
An Obligated Woman
I stagger around you in this empty room,
a breathy vortex of wanting, incapable of
naming this grief shifting inside me, smooth
and heavy like a stone inside a pocket.
The old bat is clanging in the belfry, unable
to see the humane through my own dark lens.
I would sink into your body if it could
provide me any consolation:
I would eat you alive at the crossroads if I thought
the taste would help me swallow this sorrow.
Post-Post Modernism
I’m trying to call you but you won’t pick up.
The 911 operator told me it wasn’t an emergency,
wouldn’t be for at least three more days. Then maybe,
I could try filing a Missing Persons report, but what’s
the point when no one misses you except for me?
I threw out the hair dryer in protest. I filled the bathtub
with seltzer. Maybe I can lead you to carbonated water,
but believe me, I know I can’t make you drink. I’ll rise to
this challenge. I’ll wait here ’til my eyelashes fall out, if
that’s what it takes. Was my morning breath really that bad?
I’m sorry I didn’t wear that fancy bra. The underwire stuck
into my ribs, and it made me feel like Jesus’ slutty little sister.
You know I already have a martyr complex. Did you really
want to feed into that? I’ll put it back on if it makes you happy,
you know, but I’ll have to call you Judas if that’s the case.
I eat spicy things just to feel now. I’m so lonely I put on
the kettle just to have someone to talk to. Even the cat thinks
I’m eccentric. Won’t you just come back? The internet is a cold
and lonely place where everyone is wrong, always, and besides, can’t you
hear the siren call of my knee socks? I am wearing them just for you.
Echoes
I fall into you like skinned knees:
sticky meat, red oozing to surface,
your mouth like cold air on a wound.
Blow on it. Anyone who’s telling you
they don’t like the twinge is lying to
you. We all want that tingle from pain,
then the heady release of analgesic,
how we edge close to oblivion with
pain’s fading. If you’re truly lucky,
old wounds don’t heal right, and you
feel their echoes with the right amount
of pressure; barometric changing.
I press against you at different angles,
seeking out the sweet spot. It occurs
to me in the midst of this hungry
coupling that you are unaware that
this is what I am doing.
John Glowney
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
It’s not that they are on their way to anywhere,
although standing at a bus stop might at first
make you believe as they do that they are
more than ready to be somewhere else.
It’s a late spring day in Seattle, a little rain
on the discolored facade of the courthouse,
and on this dampened, cracked sidewalk,
as if set aside for another time, they wait:
a slender black woman, her gold-painted fingernails
glorious coins, arguing with an afro-headed man,
who flashes the white blossom of a wandering eye;
a heavy silver-haired eastern European
grandmother, the spike of a cigarette jabbed
upwards from her mouth; a clump
of over-sized jackets and baggy pants
that are three swaggering young Latino boys
next to a tall stem of a young girl
shivering in a mini-skirt, pierced eyebrow
and lip, and an ex-hippie
turned public defender, his ponytail
fraying long gray hairs. In a moment or two
the sun will break through the low clouds
as if to examine all ordinary things, and everyone
will turn and squint, their faces lit
with expectation, as if they never intended
to be so plain, as if this was a chance
for them to shine beyond themselves,
and they can’t hide their secret beauty
any more than a flowerpot
can hold back unfurling
its little bundle of petals.
A Change In Circumstance
A small good deed, I thought, to haul away
the creepers and weeds my wife had, on a Saturday
spring afternoon until sunlight ran out,
cleared and plucked from the flower beds
into an unsightly pile. I scooped bunches
of dirt-besotted stalks and leaves into a bucket,
and heard from its depths then, as if just behind my ear,
the muted persistence of a bee’s stalled flight.
My efforts had also disturbed long, fat
earthworms from, I imagined, a pleasant
slumber, or more likely, from their steady
oeuvre of eating the world around them.
They stretched like lazy, elongated accordions,
and tunneled in. But the bee, lured in by the yellow
glimmer of an uprooted dandelion, trapped lover
of unframed air and pollen’s narcotic pull,
lover of light’s many doors to elsewhere,
is now done in, denied exit. Caught off-guard
by his burial afloat, he buzzes angrily.
His little motor grinds against a root-clouded
medium, no glare of petals to steer passage out of
his clabbered milieu. His circumstance utterly transformed
at the hand of an unwitting giant,
his beautifully engineered form rendered
incompetent, his whirring gossamer wings
beat furiously into the tangled atmosphere,
row him against the fouled heavens,
carry him nowhere.
From the Book of Common Office Prayers
Let’s go where moths go for a smoke break,
or take a mental health day
with the accountants on pilgrimage
among the stub ends of pencils.
Let’s schedule a vacation at the monastery
of unpaid invoices,
or take a long lunch sipping martinis
with penguins
singing medieval drinking songs.
Let’s lie down
in the quiet room so we can hear
a golden pheasant
slipping through a white picket fence
into green thickets.
Let’s use up our sick leave
among the last wisps of breezes,
or take some personal time
in pollen’s sideways drift.
Let’s take a sabbatical and travel a year
with
the sawdust,
or find a cheap apartment in the neighborhood
of the moment
the birds startle into silence
and work
on our novel. Let’s take a cruise
on the good ship
Two Week’s Notice.
Dear god, let’s quit.
Learning A Trade
Taught the mercy of butchering
the lame cow,
schooled that what is not useful
is waste,
we wised up, staggered
out of bed,
began earlier,
rubbing the dark
from our eyes. We worked
sun down to chaff,
shavings, stalks
discarded, stub-ends, the peelings
fed to swine, day unbuckled
from dawn,
laid all the fields
open, let in
as much light as the fences
would take,
lugged frayed bundles
of leaves, scraped
the branches raw,
cut the dull plow
into the stony reservoir
of topsoil, stored enough
to starve in the spring.
We shouldered up
to the best cows,
milk flowing
and pulsing
into silver cans, slopped
the dregs, straddled
drought’s dwindling
ruts, roads to next
to nothing, a bog
of stinking water,
black sky floating
to its end, flies
milling above. The nub
of not enough
our rough apprenticeship.
Zenith
All this beauty, billboards of women
fifty feet tall, yards of golden
flesh-tone paint. I am a prisoner of my lips
and eyes and hands and skin I said.
At the studio, they cut the lights,
gave me a shirt without buttons,
a robe without a belt.
I am lifted upon scaffolding, unfurled.
I am battered and shiny as tin.
Your ink stains my flesh.
My hair is not brushed for me.
How do I feel without clothes I ask.
Pandemonium of rush hour.
A thousand infidelities inch past.
The silk air.
All the eyes crawling over me are ants.
My open mouth, my white teeth.
The trucks on the road all night
from Detroit to Tallahassee
lathe my shape.
The moan of traffic.
The coyotes lie with me,
yellow-eyed, panting.
The moths that cover me at night,
stout, hairy bodies pulsing.
When they are finished with me,
they lower me like a corpse.
I suffer all those who come unto me.
Andrea Jurjevic O’Rourke
It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective
Deep enough to step into, touch lapels of his suits,
patch leather elbows of tweed jackets, ties lurking
through thin mod prints, hint of naphthalene and musk.
And Mom’s feather-light blouses—slack polyester willows.
Rows of empty sleeves faced west, to the window
that framed the rugged Učka curving above the bay,
its hazel-green like the eyes of this fox boa that Dad,
in one of his moments of bravado, had stolen
for Mom, and that she, of course, never wore. Once,
those glassy eyes flashed, as if at the dirt-brown stack
of scuffed briefcases on the ground. Inside, sis and I found,
lay stained, yet still glossy, catalogs of the ’70s decadence—
page after frayed page of nudes running through poses.
Our lashes threshed at each of those glam-wantons—
and that dog. We’d seen sunbathers scattered across cliffs,
naked and lazy like fat beige gulls, and that other time
when we peeked through the keyhole at Dede bending
over a steaming bath, his body creased with sickness.
Instead, this show of shipyard makeovers—the hollow O’s
of pink-frosted lips, lids caked with silver eye-shadow, thick
semen, and in this up close, Salò-like shot—that puppy’s
innocent erection, its mahogany fur almost like our pet setter.
Romani Orchestra
Even the street kids running by a kavana in this poorly-lit alley know your kind—
another dull Slavic star among clouds of smoke,
balanced on the edge of a rickety stool, leaning toward some new, pretty face,
the two of you cleansed in the reflection of shot glasses.
From their street, your mouth is a funk apparat of familiar lines: all brass, blather,
your tar-grained voice plying romance like a fiery Balkan accordion.
And for a few more dinars between the strings, the violin will keep lamenting,
trumpets coughing their belligerent longing,
your blind hand pawing up her warm knee until the lights come on, spill milk over
your magic squalor, the streets already in their cardboard sleep.
Time Difference
Six hours apart is not too bad on an average day.
Like when you step into jeans, still stiff
from cleanliness, I slip into the coldness
of sheets. And in some other world
somehow more physical than typing notes
we almost meet in one naked moment,
though not many days are average just as you
are not an average man. Except, you remind me
of someone I knew years ago—at times
even loathed—he, too, was a picaresque consumed
with unrestrained sex and the nursing of plants:
like that ficus with bruised eyes you found
on a street curb and now tend to with UV lamps,
(the blooming cactus he filmed daybreak-to-dusk,
just as Death in Venice observes a man observing a boy).
Like the sun is busy, dedicated to the fading of drapes,
and Albuquerque dust turns the sky into sheets of slate—
how long before the limestone cliffs of the Adriatic?
Like the ebb of a paper cut, the thrill of your messages,
thin and anemic as the hours between them.
Funny, had I loved him less I’d hardly remember him,
just that skin: ashen, after he died, his gaze fixed
at the flickering persimmon out the bathroom window,
leaf shadows on his face, and the fruit of his absent breath—
More Ferarum
You make me feel graceful in savagery.
With every snarl, each small whine, I shiver like a junkie at the sight
of a burnt teaspoon,
like fever chills zing through bones, like the warmth of panic attacks.
You turn me on in uneasy ways, like a fresh widow’s recurred penchant
for crotchless panties,
the sweet ache of fucking against the stone sink behind St. Josephs’, chicory
scratching itself, the bells’ rings like tongues
gossping. In fact, I think you’re the little beast squatting under my ribs,
beating on the djembe—at each thump I tremble:
a smack like the sweet and bitter in Maraschino, a scorpion’s pinch.
I feed you nest-tangles of my hair, the skin off the small of my back, toss
in a few fine words—Spank my ass with that plank-hard cock—
so we will never get bogged down with some
ordinary anxieties, love,
just like the sea will never stop fighting itself.
Love Boat
If I talk to it nicely, will it work? he asks
while scanning my card, feeling the strip
on its plastic back. I mumble back something
clumsy. He’s cute, though, gives me long looks—
I can tell he hasn’t practiced them often.
His arms, their long mossy smoothness
shows under the rolled-up plaid shirt, its tail
tucked loosely below the ribs of his corduroys.
I think, He is far too young, and how I’ve fallen
for the bookish types too many times before,
how my history with such is enough to fill
the scrawny poetry shelf in the corner,
the one facing golden puff pastry recipes
and columns of self-help manuals.
I think how certain personal histories
should be pushed overboard some transatlantic ship,
made illegal, declined visa and residence and sent
to Cuba, or some other godforsaken place.
But Cuban music is sensuality and vice fused tight
(the stuff decisions are usually made of), and I imagine
Creole nights must have that strange sultry flavor, too.
I think about how mellow sounds can be cues
for something more disturbing—like jazz in movies
signals a brooding scene in a little room in the back,
someone sitting on a bistro chair under a bare bulb,
beaten like the orange pulp of six hundred cracked
mamoncillos. At the same time I fail to understand
the meaning of an unresponsive bookstore card,
and why, an hour later, as I stir granules of raw sugar
into my macchiato, I find that my new notebook