Men She Had Known

iii.
He beat her silly
with his easy manner
and promises, gleaming
copper etchings
never materialized
the night he served her
Sake in a Mason jar
with a nightcap
of Latex, so nothing
could touch him.

iv.
He plunged fingers
deep in the dark,
sought moisture
to quench his thirst.
If only he could have
dampened her
against his rigid
pride, he might have tasted
the oasis in the desert
between them.

v.
She watched him strip
away the layers
he wore in the world,
stood before her, bare
souled. She bought
the whole package,
wrote receipts in poetic form,
although he had little
to give her, being
fully clothed and otherwise
spoken for.

For You, Who On My Birthday, Celebrate Your Birth Day, Too
Lisa, Kerri, Ben, and Ron

To share the day our mothers bore
the weight of birth as underscore
to sex enjoyed with charity,
their clothes cast off familiarly,
bodies sung as eyes explored

consciousness tossed overboard.
I like to imagine years before
you conspired with me in parity
to share the day

of yesteryears our mothers bore
their body’s soliticious shore.
Our pre-breath solidarity
in utero dexterity, treading water
in mother’s core, till time
to share the day.

Biker at Starbucks Naps

Patrons patronize the coffee shop
and each other, except he
whose grizzly chin rests
against his black leather jacket.
His chaps, tight on thighs,
cropped at the most male parts
now nestled without the steady hum
and buzz of Harley, its headlight
cocked to one side, waiting
as its owner’s head lolls then, too
until they are all three
parked at the same slant.

Palm Reading

They sway as one. Yet,
when the hour comes,
neither frond nor palm suffer
the parting. Leaves turn
green to brown
rustling earthbound,
each demise incrementally closer
to the hollow finale.

Palms die a little at a time,
no purple heart
to memorialize courage.
They refuse to measure loss
as anything but living.
Even now, they undulate
in the breeze, beckoning,
"Come. My coconuts are ripe
for picking."

Imperfect Parcels of Gratitude

Mother Relinquishing
You opened thighs,
bore the loss of shaping
who I would become. Determined
to help me to enter the world, flesh
stirred within, conceived me
before I understood consciousness
myself. You offered me
life. I thank you.

Mother Receiving
You opened your arms,
bore the pangs of my indifference
as I sought origins of my beginning.
In due time, you conceived
me needing a history of my own
cellular division to meld genetics
with experience. You offered me
sanctuary. I thank you.

Late October
for Caroline

The heat has come late,
and unexpected. Listen,
there are no ears left
on the sweet corn. Stalks
torn from the earth. Rows
and rows of pumpkins
cut from the vine
like too many red-headed dolls
decapitated by jealous

brothers. Listen,
sometimes it is not
a brother
whose hands
do not understand.

Sometimes, heat
will rise out of season;
a mother forgets
how easily tulips
bruise.

This one, listen—
she didn’t mean
for the lavender pollen
to stain her daughter’s
forehead.

Before the coroner’s report,
she had never even heard
the word petechiae.

Response to Matthea Harvey’s Call for Guerilla Poetry
On the occasion of two honored poets’ decline*

i. Seamus
Not exactly a pissing shame.
It would have been enough to scrawl
No! on the title page of the book
that pays you royalties, even if
a poet’s payment is never royal
enough. The act of pen scratching
against page, your magic scribble,
what she wanted to see
even if she couldn’t read it,
didn’t want to, you know, sell it
on ebay as anything recognizable
by you. A mark blossoming ink
into the story she would tell her son
when she took the feather-paged,
broken-backed book down
forty years later, fingering a line
you once conceived. Being eleven,
her son was still young enough
then, to believe in the infallibility
of heroes. The type, she said,
was only a bit of postmodern retrofit
to the synapse blip of a poet’s brain,
but this, this handwritten scrawl
on the title page, this sprawling
human urge to reject, this illegible no
was written by the great Seamus Heaney, a poet
who remembered what it was
to believe in men larger than life.

ii. Galway
It is almost a pissing shame,
what you forgot to say
when you read your poem-
in-progress. Sometimes the nose
leads one astray, eh? Bad rhymes
in your name, almost
a pissing shame. I, new poet
on the block, forgot
how undivided attention
to the lure of a line
will make others attest
that writers (I am too
often with my pages, too.)
let the written word usurp
connections of the human kind.
I apologize for my intrusion.
I intended only a moment
for you to sign.

iii. Paul
Yes, definitely. Yes.
It is a pissing shame. If only
you had read something,
anything,
after you pitched us to run fetch
books from the Labyrinth with our
hard-earned cash and 15% discount,
well-trained Labradors returning
with slobbery balls and lolling tongues.
I could have bought your book too,
or maybe, I mean, I could have
chosen something else, say, tickets
to a Mariners game to watch
J.J. Putz shut out another batter,
or skipped poetry altogether,
changed my flight to Vegas
knowing if I turned up two kings,
I should bet it all
on a three-of-a-kind.



*to sign books.
Princeton Poetry Festival. Princeton, NJ. April 27, 2009.

Nassau on the Horizon

She lulls you asleep with her rocking
like your mama, like your yoo-hoo,
baby, sweetheart, honey-love girl.
She creaks like old wood
drying in summer heat,
groans and shudders
under your weight.
Her highs and lows
serve every whim.
Each thank you
returns her silky
"My pleasure."

Huffing and Puffing

Three
young ladies
huffing hairspray
stuck to boys pressing
arms around their shoulders
offering maximum hold protection.
Girls’ minds blown on aerosol
can’t see all the boys want
is a temporary hold
against feminine
skin; judgment
lost in three
lacquered
brains.



"Huffing and Puffing" originally appeared in Green Monsters on Red Moons.

Run, Girl
for Nissa

The wind at your back
cheers your momentum.
Spectators pack the trail,
ready lips suck cold air,
legs pumping long strides,
hair blowing back except
for the part in back
that lags straight up
like some hep-cat
in Louisiana. You,
the blond, blue-eyed
child who came to us at
three wishing you could run
wild with the mommy who wouldn't be one.
You're all legs at fourteen, but she eludes you
still. The surrogates you chase in her place
naughty-haired, white-smiling boys
with four-packs hold intentions
other than motherly.

Breathe, girl.
Work your hard, lean muscles.
Toss your hep-cat head
like the mule you've become
packing love for those
who never claim it.

Run, girl.
Your origins
mere competitors
and you blowing by.



A prior version of "Run, Girl" first appeared in Poetic Voices.

Some Toads Are Messengers

I bade him tell you
Hurugh. Hurugh.

Roughly translated
from Bullfrog, which is all
he knows, it means:

Come, I am eager
to share flies.

tasting

imagine grape
firm and yielding
crushing the essence
fruit into wine

imagine merlot
rich and compliant
succulent juice
alive on the palate

imagine lips
savoring harvest
robust delight
flesh upon tongue

Mother’s Last Dance
for Del

You make it easy to suffer the loss
of importance in the world,
show films of our true selves
as you dangle just out of reach.

When others come running, touched
faces disconsolate, the ice burst
settled in your skin,
I become the burnished sun
you rest against. Their breath

writes slow notes
in your periphery. They stand
bedside, hoping
to apprehend the music you are
dreaming; they cannot stand
you living in previous time.

You remain in the now
this very moment, close
to death: Its softness.
Its gentle gift good night.

regret

hearts cloaked
after years of lying
spooned naked

Scent of a Place She Did Not Want to Go
for Michelle

The brand new Ford Escort I rented
to drive her to Seattle, Washington.

Seattle, Washington, the restaurant
at Pikes Place Market, fish scales

and oysters on the half shell, slipped
down her throat, scent enough to gag.

Queasy at the top of the Space Needle,
she didn’t want to talk about it

or get back in the Escort to return
to the Bayshore Inn. She wanted

to run, wanted only to run,
not away, she said, but to.

To what? I asked. She threw her
perfumed hair back and laughed

bull-headed, as I packed her bags.
I thought a long hike in the Cascades

with Outward Bound could free her
from the spiked stakes

picadores plunged in her
while she was still a child. I thought

she would heal in the scent of earth
mulch and cedar boughs, could learn

to bend away from fatal thrusts.
She called the second day, wanting

to talk about the rental car.
She hated it, she said,

it reminded her of moving
from one foster home to another

with nothing to stake her future on,
just the smell of the State car

and a garbage bag of belongings
to accompany her. The place

at the top of the Space Needle
was too cramped, she said, men

leaned against her. She could smell
booze coming through their pores,

stale tobacco, dried cum on their
skin. It made hers crawl.

Her arms and legs tried to follow
some dozen years later, after

the odor of industrial ammonia
in Rosemont Girls Home,

after the smell of her own
breath, chalky from medications

they made her take, after her
daughter was born, her tears

and sweat as her body tore
open. She could smell her own blood

and urine, the antiseptic, and
baby Karissa’s damp curls

coming out of the place where
hers had been shorn. Even

the soft smell of the baby’s head
after her first bath, the warm milk

letting down, didn’t clear
the scents she carried with her

from childhood: adult men
pressing against her bare skin.

First lilac, now horseshit, now
stale beer, now Lemon Pledge,

the series of homes she moved through,
pressed to be Christian,

Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness,
till she didn’t know what to believe

except what she had been taught
to play, the skin flute; and take,

methamphetamines; to dull senses
she wanted to forget, and they did

too, dull them, on the day her car
left the road at a slight curve

plunging down an embankment, where
she lay trapped in the stench of her own

shit, ribbons of handprints
blossoming into a blood-red cape,

la plaza de toros final.

Makes as Much Sense as Anything Else

the zoo fell on all the keepers’ toes
until they were unlate and sorely bent
with grins as stark as blue monkeys
puffing up hills of Indonesian ink
they could not even find their patchouli oil
to keep fleas off butterfly wings

one of the wise-cracking eggs
(spoiled for lack of vegetation)
decided Pilatus Porter should be mayor
of Portland because he knew
all about wiring buildings
and dethroning frocks

Citibank went sideways
babies stopped crying
the state of Oregon fell into a huge
crevasse, a serendipitous hole
made of mint-flavored Lifesavers
that had been crushed and re-cemented
in a scheme to save the self-esteem
of all those apes
who never even bothered to vote.

Penmanship

When I see your words online,
posted moments before mine,
I’m back in third grade,
Bradley Burns
brushing up against me
in the coat room.

When I see your name
almost touching
mine, I’m learning cursive,
delighted
how my body curves
around the pencil.

Dr. M

The distance between crazy
and sane is the space between
your thumb and finger. You bewitch
the brain, first with your dark
eyes, then with potions to beguile
the mind. You ask them to place
the whisper of their breath
in your palms, entrust the journey
under knife to your care, though
they don't know you well
enough to share a cup of coffee
or an evening meal. You send them
off to wake up hard and hurting,
or soft and scratching (or sometimes,
not at all) and for this they pay
a king's ransom, itemized
Services— Anesthesia.

Pileated Takes a Moment to Reflect

Worry herself, that's what she does.
Tapping the top of the barbecue
lid, hoping it will open, hoping
there are bits of flesh
worth carrying
back to the hollow nest
where dependents
wait

wait

wait—
Shouldn’t she be
looking somewhere else
for what she needs? She won’t
find it there in the steel case
of charred remains.
Isn’t it true,
she could
tap

tap

tap
all day, nothing
would come of it.

shouldn’t she be pecking
at some earthy tomb?
Shouldn’t she
be grubbing around?
Why couldn’t she

be soaring,
showing off her red cap
like the scarlet letter she wishes
it would become.

Shouldn’t she stop staring in windows
that can never be forests?

Pileated Woodpecker Is Not on the List
Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap.

Despite loud ringing
calls, and persistent rapping,
she doesn’t get in.