Men beg to fumble change
deep in my pocket, to shoot blanks
against an open, empty locket.
I’ll only get drunk enough
to achieve a higher pastoral plane,
rapt, dropping clothes with a hypnotic clap
every time someone says leave.
Fluid Dynamics
I’m only awake to his body
while asleep at the wheel,
spinning into traffic cams
I didn’t see until the last moment.
That’s not true — watching myself
being watched is a new ball game,
the kind with chandeliers.
I want to unsee all the passed-out
cocktail hours of my life, glowering
in the glow of hunting décor.
Listen, I would never Jolene your man,
but he may not put up a fight.
He’s solid when everything’s sopping,
a barrel-aged object of objection.
One time, his double swayed me
south of where I’m supposed to be:
stirred into a mind’s eye levity.
I want a love that flows preternaturally.
Midsummer Signal
O, it was sunny above the cloudline.
I climbed steep ridges,
suffered shrub-bloodied ankles
to call you and left the same
message each time.
Once, armed to the nines
with appraisals, guts spun
inside me like soft serve.
I described the archipelago
until your mailbox was full.
Rinsed my wounds
in brackish water.
In a crumbling castle,
I traversed a velvet rope
to the royal weapon room
and counted so many guns
I got vertigo.
On a guided tour, I learned
that when the sun shines
for years on leather wallpaper,
it splits and shrivels; storied lore
in colours is ruined slowly
over time, as everything is.
Lo, sometimes even in the lap
of baroque luxury,
you can’t escape daylight.
The Wetlands Draw Conclusions
Three people saw me naked with Mercury in retrograde.
Each a Sagittarius, they had nothing in common.
The sky fell in blurry chunks at my side.
My Leo died, is why. His particular sneeze, his urges,
noted then thrown out on a crumpled sheet.
You can’t unsee the crease in paper once you fold it.
In my binoculars’ beam, a grackle sunned itself
upon the atmospheric rubble, puzzled, but content
to shine. There may not be light enough for all of us.
Living is waving your arms for help in pitch dark.
The fire-signs took me to a swamp with live, rowdy things:
flowering water, grass electric with hum, ribbit, tweet.
I cleaved the wetlands to chase them back to city grid.
A new orbit started. As though it couldn’t wait.
If they had a birding goal, I didn’t find their blue jay.
Party Favours
Dressed as Maximilian Kolbe on All Saints’ Day
but you found no glory. You looked good in stripes.
By Christmas you stopped gleaming in the light.
You put a puss on, insistent, carving out your place.
Aside from sex-sputtering nightmares you’re warped inside.
Party favours are handcuffs; cake is dead weight.
Unwrap the companion gift of permanent high tide.
Glory Days
I quit music for Lent, but sighed
so loud a tune came out.
See, I can never tell
how I want things to be.
That’s why I’m unlovable
or at least hard to please.
I want every song sung by Springsteen.
I need a boss for my home life.
Sketch me the monuments
I tried to forget. Let’s meet halfway
in a green card marriage, so I can swaddle
my bouncing baby boys to Born in the U.S.A.
I figure Bruce dreams the same
way he sings, plainly, earnestness
drawn out so clear I am embarrassed
by my secrecy, by all his feelings,
eyes closed for the good parts.
There’s a dream there
and I’ve earned my slice.
Lime Kiln Ruins
Your wolf birds are starting to show.
I pretend not to notice.
On this trail winds are shushing,
crows croaking over dead
and bounce, we practise leaf peeping.
Those kids know the route better
and shimmy up the rock face
where we skidded with their dog Sierra.
I’m tired of this struggle to stay
upright on slick ground, of overhearing
and being afraid to heed. In a day
you’ll be gone east, tucked in
or haunting the river beasts
of another bed, but not too deeply;
I’ll be central, sleeping,
splashing around. We’ve lived
in all the same places, settled
bodies in ditches, buried fools.
Sierra barks somewhere uphill.
Your stiffened posture mimics
the cliff. Where are all the human,
earthly things?
My passerines become visible.
You’re scattering seeds.
We share this swift trail, the mist
rising off the escarpment,
each red tree fatigued and huffing.
The End of Grief
When the end of grief was announced
the houses on our street
slouched until all were lopsided.
Those of us who dwell
on the mysteries of our dead
wedge our bodies into the foundations.
We want as long as possible to figure out
what might be beautiful about loss.
The river rushes anew,
water so opaque it looks
pleated. We want clothing
that hangs as loose as river.
Knock on the underside
of floors but nobody answers —
this, too, is a sign. The houses
heave with our pulses.
Children whisper through dirt
that since the declaration
and resultant slanting of their beds,
they only dream of flying.
We feel sorry for them.
Our dreams do chores.
They self-repair, dig trenches,
throw leaves into gutters clogged
with competing impulses:
eke out consolation
in what’s fixed, or hazard
the pang of stranger gravity.
Fraterville Coal Mine
We are all praying for air to support us,
but it is getting so bad without any air.
In the absence of air
did it feel like your body split
or tempered?
Ellen, I want you to live right
and come to heaven.
There are things
you should know, Jacob.
I live according to my impulses
part time. Other men paw
the sticky ladder of my neck bones
as they stoop over me too fast,
too close to the woodstove.
Raise the children the best you can.
Goodbye Ellen, goodbye Lily,
goodbye Jemmie, goodbye Horace.
I woke the children
as you p
uttered into the mine.
Lily’s mute since the nightmares,
Jemmie’s a real middle child,
Horace has something to live up to.
Elbert is filled with your blood,
I am filled with Eddie’s.
Each kid slipped
too quick from my frame,
breathed up all the wind.
Oh, how I wish to be with you, goodbye.
I let the horses out that night
to buy some time in bed.
I have a favourite child.
Your face will be indelible,
your nakedness will fade.
I’m afraid that nothing
is fast approaching.
We are together.
What did it look like within the roof fall?
An expected hush, wet cotton?
Or colours I can’t thread together,
a caterwauling stirring dust
until the impulse stopped.
Is 25 minutes after two.
There is a few of us alive yet.
I cave in. Time becomes nature.
You spill through the mouth
of a mountain.
Perseids
You shave paint from shingles for days
in a way so angry it’s graceful.
Yellow confetti blankets the ground.
Our archives are returning to you,
not in paint, not even in colours,
but in repetitive tasks.
Today, my work is to transcribe.
I write clumsy, then cross it out.
The list could become a map,
and if you follow it, you might fall.
Instead I jot accomplished, alongside
other words you’ve long disowned,
and in their foreignness I hope
to confer some illumination.
The future is sealed
because night will come.
In sleep we walk through unlocked doors
to planets with perfect, humid air.
Your body is exhausted, crouched
and tender even in recovery.
As we trade pillows,
Perseid meteors dash across the night.
Come morning, you’re launched
onto scaffolding.
That feeling, like watching someone
use your furniture as if it were theirs.
Ricochet
A body walks by
on my legs.
Stretched out, I
recollect, watch
myself become
a child, immobile,
in a place
that captures
youth and holds
it hostage. Supple
limbs propel
and flex, then fade,
ache and stiffen.
Age implying loss
of movement:
to be desiccated
into shape.
There’s a point
at which one
cannot reconsider.
It’s the same place
where I realize
I’ve never
been weightless.
In fact, I’m sinking
into quiet.
Where to go
if one is eager
to forge ahead?
Towards the sound
of the rightful
owner.
In a twitch of tendons
I clutch elastic
sole skin, girlish
before it got bullied
by plough-trenches
and barrenness.
A trail wears out
from door to
field to grassy
cellar to roadside
stand and back.
No mistakes.
Always a return
route tracing
the boomerang
path of thoughts.
My knees buckle.
Coven
Till I was sixteen, I thought Sylvia Plath
put her head in a lit oven.
I’ve never wanted anything
enough to melt my face off.
In the evening, I pick my stigmata
scabs, and show myself out.
I slap my face three times
and come like Beetlejuice.
It’s the why not that stings.
How stubborn I’d prefer to be.
My beard of bees mourns
razor burn in a sallow sink.
I’ve not wanted plenty, a dead dad,
arts asking too much from their faker.
MEAT
More or Less at the Canal
Something about the criss-cross of the contrails today made me nauseated. I read about a father-son murder-suicide one town over. I conjured a teenager into a pattern of the part he’d play. But the boy was only six. It has to do with dimension: a spider, magnified in a grotesque shadow, racing across my ceiling. I’ll have to kill it. I can’t live my remaining years with the responsibility for crushing insects. It’s about proving something. You’d admire the way I kept rolling on my bike from the lift-lock into the dark. I heard the glass and felt the shards around my legs like rain. I hyperventilated to keep the tires full. Because you once told me sleeping was one of the things I ruined for you, that holding me was like a hailstorm, and I believed it all.
Horses
Say horses and my hands fill with hay,
I’m at the fences hoping for affection.
Skipping ropes were reins
to control each other in the baseball diamond.
Turns taken as jockey or racer,
girls asserting themselves as Appaloosas,
or subduing their wildness to be corralled.
Blank pages quickly filled with horses
drawn when I wasn’t riding horses.
Pastern, snip, socks, blazes and stars,
and the origins of their expression.
Say rodeo and I can’t associate.
In the saloon last night was a Stetson
on a man other men lined up to talk to.
I heard a cowboy say the mechanical bull
grip is different from the one for riding broncos,
but the how was swallowed by the crowd.
I’m not obliged to stay here
and watch history hammer nails into itself.
My future is about to break an ankle.
I thought of this in the ladies’ room
where in eyeliner a mirror asked,
what are you looking at.
Race, Stock, Kin
To scout the scavengers,
coax them across the median
with fast food bait. A grand passage,
like hay worked through a bowel.
The quills and fur of the departed
remain alight with hibernation’s glow.
I catalogue roadkill by the overpass,
measure their wounds against
the circumference of to-go cup lids.
Once dead we all disappoint someone.
On the highway’s gravel shoulder,
life dribbles out of bottlenecks
like a slo-mo New Year’s Eve.
I ration time in pepperettes
and diesel prices. Find me amidst
trophies, defending a pedigree.
Home Team
I apologize for connective instincts,
like how I think of my father
each time I eat a nectarine.
I am the grandbaby of a MLB player.
Yes, two generations away from talent.
I wear my goals and failures like ankle weights.
Take me out. I could learn to make him proud.
Years pile up enough to swagger.
It’s on me to hew time into palatable chunks.
I think of my children with each bicep curl.
My body is a joke —
maybe you’ve heard it before?
It lives in an overprice
d apartment,
prefigures its own dysmorphia.
I started out too far behind, that is,
was born late in the day. Warmth
pours into me. I can’t retain it.
Sun slides off my back. The burn
is aimless, so I carry, carry, carry.
Natural Crime
I allow myself skin, not the meat of the animal.
It’s better to eat what will grow back.
This I learned from a children’s program
that turned out to be sponsored by endemic plants.
Look at the blazing sun refracting
a magenta shroud for city buildings.
Nature was once America’s
pastime, but times are tough.
The matryoshka doll in an orca’s belly
bleeps its location to marine biologists.
Whales are the new heartthrobs, one day
they’ll fulfill their purpose, then disappear.
I plated the whole fish with its lidless eye,
reflecting that I’d never scaled, seldom gutted.
Evolution gives me hope that my children will be
immune to mosquitoes, which might mean they’ll be tasteless.
Have you ever heard of the funnel theory?
Bred for size, we’ll shrink to occupy Victorian dollhouses.
Ultimately, we’ll succumb to the influence of ant colonies
who’ll chant: Behold the twilight of your species.
Regard the blood moon while a man howls.
An untraceable myth has failed us.
Summer Vacation
This is not my first memory,
but the first I care to talk about.
It’s summer. I weep, silent,
as doctors test my reflexes.
My friends ride bikes
without training wheels.
At night I count cricket chirps.
By an open window I pick skin
raw as it itches with insomnia.
The dentist retrofits me
with canines that curve, sharp,
adept at crushing bone.
Days flop their uniform bodies.
I learn a new means of chewing.
Carrion tastes of all the charred flesh
I’ve molared on backyard patios;
it reminds me of meaningful
eye contact shared with raccoons
and dogs, as if to say,
we are all hungry.
If you’re just joining me,
blood has stained my chin,
replacing my puberty’s