--MAYBE
YOU SHOULD APPROACH ME SIDEWAYS
…I
went to a Christmas party in Seattle last night, which was a lot of fun, but
man oh man was it cold this morning.
When
I got home I found out I had these poems accepted and published in Colours
Journal:
The Missing
I heard the bullet hiss
through the black-holed night. I watched
the drugstore window shatter, the clerk’s pistol smoking as you slumped like
rags.
It was supposed to be easy money but
we never figured on Eddy turning.
Now time is nothing is everything is too much
balloon skin, stretching and contracting like a rubber sack that holds me
captive.
I lean against an object, never a
person. You would have bought me pretty
things with lace, new dolls, a porch swing.
I’ve kept your remnants—Sex Pistols
sweatshirt, your Kerouac book, a skeleton key.
But the bullet, that is the piece of you I covet most.
Written By
For Christmas I am given a tool
set. Unwrapped, it consumes the kitchen
table. My typewriter sets on the
linoleum floor, a heap of springs and metal.
Mother watches Father who picks bacon from his teeth and tells me, “Go
ahead, I want to see this. Fix the
thing.”
There
is a Mark
Cops
and reporters came
with
their carnival barker noise,
nighttime
lit up like the Fourth
by
sirens and generators.
For
a while this was the place to be,
last
stop at the end of the world,
gangs
getting even,
bludgeoning
a little girl.
Now
all that’s here is a mark,
a
wine stained-Venezuela.
Some
days I pull out the book she gave me, bloated thick from the rain.
If
I could read it, I would.
But
I never cry and I don’t sweat anymore because
my
blood is made of concrete
and
my dreams are steel.
Downs
Cat
sweaters and puppet clothes lay on the floor by your sister’s doll house,
small
as quilt squares.
The
naked Barbies wait to be dressed
and
Ken is blind or bored
but
your sister is rocking and slapping herself convulsing.
You
take her hand away the same as removing a strand of hair.
You
hold her palm, tell a joke and there in the laughter
I
find a resemblance,
how
her mongoloid eyes are lit with your same sense of wonder.
In
the doorway saying goodbye,
sideways
rain pimples your cheek,
sounding
tinny on the gutters,
and
you ask,
“What? What are you smiling about?”
Teenage
Summer
The
good thief watches while
we
soak in a night-blackened sea of shimmering oil,
water
that makes us weightless
even
as you kick and paddle.
We’ll
be old soon enough.
Now
the stars urge us to write songs or
yodel
so that our laughter rifles through the sky.
The
waves rock us like babies.
They
slurp across our slick skins
and
beckon us to kiss,
kiss
deep and long
as
lovers do.
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