Three Poems

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Hammerspace

Roger Rabbit carries his belongings in a bindle like a fool / He left the door to his wife’s apartment open as he walked through to Toon Town but turned towards his favorite juice joint for a celery & tomato shrub with carrot puree chasers / Folks talk about the weather changing like it’s a bad thing but no matter the forecast for Roger it’s always sunshine & rainbows / Every morning is Saturday morning & every holiday a bottomless spring break / Even the storm clouds that hover above grayscale despots & dumpster divers have cheery little smiles drawn around their gritty cherubic faces / As he skips down cracked pavement Roger’s bindle bounces to a beat audiences can’t hear & ink drips from his last bottle & leaks out & stains the gingham tablecloth he used to pack up his things / Once again Jessica had enough tricks & sent him out in a hurry / If Roger would pause for a moment & wonder why all of his possessions always fit inside a small bag he might take stock not of the life he has but of the powers he’s been blessed with / Not many of us can pull anvils from our pockets or carry around moveable holes to push our adversaries into blankness / Drawing doors with a line of chalk will get the rest of us nowhere but for Roger Rabbit every wall is a welcomed invitation / The trick is that his magic works at its best when Roger forgets about his powers completely / When his head is in the clouds & not on the problem in front of him is when the unforeseen meets the unexpected / So give the goofy rabbit a break / And watch the anvils miss him as they fall. 

 

Order a round of juice | Turn to page 6

Take a cab to the motel | Turn to page 7

 

Manscaping

Euphegenia Doubtfire stands in the bathroom in a silk nightgown staring crosseyed in the mirror at her reflection like a priestess plucking her eyebrows / With her thumb & forefingers after giving up aiming with the dollar store tweezers / Her bare feet step on her shag carpet & clippings the tiny yellowed crescents that get between her toes / Will be swept into a little pile hours from now after winnowing the detritus from the sink onto the floor / Euphegenia Doubtfire feels plucky for once after years of falling backwards through life almost as if all the shaving & waxing & peeling & primping & pressing pushes / The spirit back into her middle aged midlife dolor / The work she puts into her appearance makes everything else she does throughout the day appear almost effortless / Like sifting a fine sand from an exotic beach through a sieve so only the shells remain / Her nightly routine can be rushed down to twenty minutes if she skips the hair beneath her blouse & bloomers but lately Euphegenia Doubtfire has learned to enjoy the time she spends shearing away what grows deep inside her / Sculptors don’t remove stone they disagree with or hate / Or take to the chisel with malice & vengeance / But they chip down to the essential stories the stone tells & like a sculptor Euphegenia is now learning to listen / Her body bumps & bruises under her razors & when she bleeds Euphegenia celebrates the blood she shares with her children & rolls up tissue to blot the blood not bc she wants to but bc she’s borrowing her brother’s brasier / Euphegenia listens when her blood drips onto the pedestal & into the tub of retinol she heard her wife swear by & decided to try.

 

Practice listening to Euphegenia’s body hair | Turn to page 8

Take an evening off & shave tomorrow | Turn to page 9

 

You There Bert? It’s Me Ernie

It’s been eight months since we watched them raise the drawbridge in the rain / A cold night during a cozy time of year & even though our apartment was full of enough orange things we wanted to go out & get some more / Juices / Leather covers for our tambourines / A razor scooter I thought was for two people but you pointed out was actually a tricycle contraption in scooter form / We wore slickers with matching galoshes & I forgot my umbrella but you didn’t no you never seem to forget yours / You never forget anything / Always itemizing an inventory / Always adding the dots to my little i’s / We took the bus down to the waterfront & fed the ducks just in case the tourists didn’t bc tourists tend to forget about them when it rains / But not you Bert / Folks tend to forget that about you / How reliable you make yourself to others / To me / To Duckie / And your mom / You really let her come around to us in the end / Most people wouldn’t have done that after the language we suffered / But you did the right thing & left her room to apologize / And I’ll never forget that you did that / Because it was the most Bert thing anyone could do. 

 

We are not talking right now Ernie | Turn to page 12

We’re taking a break Ernie | [control] [A] [delete]

I’ll text you when I’m ready Ernie | Turn to page 13

You sound nice but this isn’t Bert | Turn to page 14

Three Poems

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A 4th of July in Rosarito

The sun has an extra weight,
a hammer that falls like hurricane

when we make the sky quake
at least once per year. But now

driven shotgun beyond border, those blasts
push short of quiet sea under-construction homes,

stairs rising from beach sand
to landings without doors.

Men tar a ply roof. One is learning
an apathy, and sings for bother.

All the kelp on water’s ceiling
breaks in a cove by Calafia,

a bust of a bald man faces a window
like he’s excited by extinction’s threat,

some iron fire out in the east, a Jesus
down the road looking down the road.

 

Artifacts in the Alley

It doesn’t have to be all dumpsters and rubble.
I found a series of staircases in flight
toward attic cloud, an opening
where the air’s thinner,

a reservoir in the gait, the volume
of sweat we expect a title to hold.

Level these with me: the claims
to land, signatures in shoveled stone
stacked against nature, pulverized
to the gravel by decades’ pressure.

I could hear you through any garden,
a bear learning to play the tuba.

Trash truck shifts to the beep beep reverse
off the black/blue/green bins. Window bars
make a glockenspiel built with plates of one note:
a consistent dense mass to chime

the song we’ll hear as a wandering march.

 

We Used to Play Instruments

Everyone wants a soft voice
in a heavy piano mallet salad,
a study of sound’s repetitive joy.

You’ve forgotten modes & arpeggio joys,
my fingers hold strings ragged
and everyone wants soft voices.

To listen as a clear choice
burrow in sound of banger or ballad,
a study of sound’s repetitive joy.

My own melody is a sloppy patois
wandering, like forgotten language, pallid.
Everyone wants a soft voice.

Sheet music is beautiful but annoys
like we’re murmuring Hebrew, DOS, or Latin,
a study of repeated sounds unvoiced.

Last night we dreamed of Illinois
and a whole alphabet planted
every once-wanted soft voice,
study of repeated sounds rejoiced.

Two Poems

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I’m ashamed of my body but I put it on the page

where it buzzes like a phone that should be silent. I sometimes wish to be on a beach and just so precisely in the moment that I feel the sand and the sea and the vibrations of a low mood in which I can write. My subconscious is a terrible writer, though: dreams of being unable to fly home, losing my sister in the dark, no-one hearing me cry and I call a name out like trauma and the call is coming from inside the house etcetera. If I wade deeper into Silent Mode, however, I can write nothing. That’s not true; I write the same thing over and over, against tides, in the failure of home over and over again I write: waah-waah-waah write a poem about it.

He’s as deep as The Mariana Trench (when it writes poetry)

He’s all about that darkness
and what we still don’t know,
mysterious
like someone on an app
inviting you to meet
to drown
in their self-regard.
You breathed the sea once
and did not die;
you read coral lines of drama;
single cell organisms
rewarded with caves
and all that darkness
he hasn’t earned.
Nowhere near.

Five Poems

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The Price of Okra

Lit crit with the speedo architect aw god what a narky bitch
When lambo, buy the dip
two suicides off the Williamsburg Bridge

all this Fire Island modernism
and the sun like a mouthful of vodka.
Coleridge is here, and Lulu. “I’m working

on a building,” Speedo says, “that’ll fuck you
like the price of okra.” I don’t get it. I’m mid-
point on a bell curve. Lulu is releasing years

of trauma watching the birds make a dress for
Cinderella. Flippening/flappening, pump and dump.
How fast can you catch an STD?

Cedar siding, post-and-beam, Canasta and charades
no lawns, no fences, suspended floors that draw the breezes
like silk assets and wrap dresses —yes

a close reading is open to suggestion, like
hunger and harm and my second sex. Someone
takes a polaroid of Speedo’s deck, someone

slut walks from Vienna to The Met, someone
makes a margarita as we paint the walls without the edges.
When moon, buy the dip

I draw a line of beauty from your stomach to your hip.
The novel is dead. The novel is dead
Someone put on Pet Sounds because Brian Wilson’s dead.

 

The Blue Terrace

We love without demand
and bitch with a tender eye
like the pull of Hockney’s pool paintings
all that afternoon light
splashing this way and that
and Nick’s pale ass
Have you ever seen a paler ass
or a bluer terrace
or more loneliness
as the sun in its white trunks?

We’re never lonely at Paul’s house
fridge of beer
good tequila
reggaeton
Susana in the bath
that poet that everyone says
is almost
American surrealism
and the other one who writes abt boardwalks
and the blue & red of Giotto,

the splash
a bigger splash
God we’re a snooze
So many mediocre poets
doing so many mediocre things
Like John’s old dick
I can barely stir in the sunlight like a hyacinth
Susana is posting her tan lines
I told her I was happy for her
I lied a bit
like so many little things
vying for attention.

 

Playland

Maybe I don’t care enough about the testament of poor Villon
or why the boys are eating danish on the beach.
Pilates, adoration, mass

a glorious orgasm of Marian grottoes,
in their weekend king Chubbies my heart drawn out in twenty strokes.
Keta / MINE. And Debbie on the decks with oyster mouth—

O punch cut the cigar. Again I dreamt I died on the other
side of innocence. Dead again in the National Gallery. Cursed
like finding peanuts in the cockpit at the Indy. Me be cool

with Madge. Be cool with Diana. Straight jack it, modern
power. Running red lights on Route 1A. Waves like spilt
pills, foamy mouths. Dick thick chocolate shell. Clench-

and-crack, curious pout. That’s how they do it in Dubai.
All jaw and then a whipping at the cart’s tail. To Dear Harry
Boy everything could have been so perfect, like acid revealing

an invisible script. Neck muscle and Nikon. Pinball at Playland.
I’m bitter over sweet, an unkept bikini. I’m black habits singing
hymns to the amusement of passing boats.

 

Rapture

O Hannah
you spell your name with two of everything.
It’s the summer of the comet.
I want to vibrate like an angel
and you’re reading a book
that isn’t a gift
for anyone over thirty.
Everything tends towards a conclusion that doesn’t occur.
I have no defense for poesy.
Does anyone know how to get to the Bop House?
The whole shit is breaking down
and my refrigerator isn’t ready for riot season.
John Maus has a new single called I Hate Antichrist.
What do we talk about when we talk about luxury?
You’re reading A Poem for Vipers when lifeguards
pull a dead swimmer
from the water off Hampton Beach.
The weather is beautiful.
I eat aspirin for dinner and drink Rolling Rock.
Karen Read is framed like a Nantucket sunset.
O Hannah
we lost two of everything.
On the rooftop
of an apartment on Ashworth Ave
we watch a cumshot
dance on the tip
of a
telescope.


Labor Day

I’m going to eat them
I tell Jill when she asks
what’s going to happen to the kids

it’s Neddy’s Labor Day party
and we’re standing by the pool;
Jill is drunk, bulwarked in white

and once my dirty laundry
becomes the state of the nation
she bats her eyes one too many times

Jill never liked my wife
and in broad daylight her warpaint
is merciless

she leans in
touches my arm and says
no, really, what about the kids

it’s the same proposal
my wife had eight years ago;
I know how to wash laundry

I say, and air out a cannonball
that makes Ned’s modest pool
heave with misfortune.

Let’s Start from an Earlier Block of Save Data

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I remember the first time we played Minecraft.
Years ago. We spawned in a barren snow biome.
Resources were scarce. We needed food,
so we killed some cows and pigs for raw meat.
Then we spent a long time walking
before we found a tree to punch for some wood.
It was nighttime by then, which means
skeletons were appearing and shooting
us with arrows. They shot our little square heads
and our little square legs and arms and hands
until our screens went red and we were back
at our spawn point with nothing. We rushed
back to our death-piles to reclaim the wood
we had dropped, but immediately got pummeled
with arrows again. Red screen. You Died! Spawn point.
Repeat. We kept trying until a square sun replaced
the square moon and so much time had passed
that our wood had despawned from the ground.
I felt genuine sadness when I realized it was gone.
When you don’t have enough of something
you need, anything can feel like everything.

And I feel that sadness again today
as I grieve standing in front of the toilet, flaccid penis
in hand, a leftover droplet of urine plunging to its death.
I’m not grieving for the urine itself, or for the clear water
I’ve just dyed the color of a pixelated golden apple.
I’m grieving because of the skid mark.

Your skid mark.

Last night’s skid mark.

The skid mark you left on the side
of the toilet bowl before you packed
your bags and got into your mom’s car.

I’m grieving because I drank too much beer
and self-hatred today, and in my fucked-up state,
I didn’t catch myself power-washing
your skid mark from existence.

I never wanted to make it — or you — disappear.
I never wanted to send you back to your spawn point.

Last night’s argument was chaos. Hard mode.
I don’t know why we were speed-running.
We should have zoomed out.
We should have tried different camera angles.
We should have eaten some raw steak and pork,
kept still until our heart meters replenished,
let the skeletons burn in the sun.

The Bee Charmer

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There’s a woman in town who performs
healing with a net. I pay to watch

the show, front row, metal folding chair
creaking in the spring grass,
half-brown, half-waking.

She sets the scene like a traveling circus—
a communion of strangers searching
for something together at the edge

of the woods—bodies watching
body brave contortion, brave
the sting.

She stands alone in the center of us, near
the bees. We sit silently and watch
as she laces honey-lacquered twine

around her face, her head. Then
she opens the hive to let the bees swarm
around her most delicate organs.

The sight is beautiful and terrifying
and it’s hard to look away.
But I close my eyes.

I remember that I came here to feel
the bees, not to see them. To be close
to their noise without being
their first target.

I’ve heard that being in the presence
of bees can calm the mind.

I’ve heard that we are attracted to
the things that we fear the most—our body’s
dress rehearsal for disaster.

Sometimes I wish for the worst so that
I don’t have to keep waiting for it.

I imagine drenching myself
in honey. I imagine the bees leaving
my mind and kissing my body

quietly in the grass.
Then contortion, then sting.

Now hum, now
stillness. Now the sound of the grass,
waking.

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