To Greenpoint
July insects buzz the sidewalk.
It's twenty minutes of rectangular and bleak to anywhere.
See the cracks,
the lines crisscrossing
the telephone poles, the concrete
and your hand,
this street disappears into empties --
beer cans and sky.
You're walking through airless shadows.
Your shoes don't make a sound.
And we have no idea where we're going.
Empty Bed
The muscles of my tongue cup him.
Broken backed chairs lean forward expectantly
and the rug curls in anticipation.
No one can close their eyes but him.
Then moonlight does what moonlight does,
but faster.
Shadows speed across his face
like a hand struggling with Braille.
I struggle for something not so solid.
Preparations, retreats --
strategies are traced on the sheets
covering his thighs.
Only when he's sleeping can I think.
Such things can be done
with a shadow.
The Anatomy of Distance
Picture an oil painting,
In the Medical Academy, by a Dutch master in 1741.
The walls are in shadow, appear to be black.
Our walls are blue.
I. The Doctors:
In the auditorium,
in our room,
spectators surround the body.
One touches it and looks at us.
He doesn't mean to touch the body
in a way that has any kindness in it,
As your fingers attempt to sign nothing
with their grasp,
but his hands are as gentle
as the soft astonished faces of the men staring at us
as we stare at them.
II. The Body:
The body does not appear
to be sleeping but dead.
Not just the pallor but the lack of eyelashes.
The upper lip curls in ecstasy or disdain.
Although the kidneys vena cava intestines
splay into our faces,
the body
is the only one
who escapes in this picture.
The one
truly alone and hidden.
III. Us.
You and I are hidden
from each other
by the body,
the deeper we thrust
our cutting, fondling instruments
the farther we float away like unmoored boats.
Until we lie next to one another
on the same bed
in different rooms
the same color as the inside of an eyelid
or eggshell,
the same color blue.
Hysterical Blindness
My life is pain.
I could be a hypochondriac.
There's some kind of multiple choice here,
but I lost the pencil and forgot to mark the page.
I'm not quite sure -- I wake up sick
in the morning, nauseated by all the light.
My feet leaving the mattress
for the floor gives me shooting pains
somewhere.
I'd have to ask my doctor,
but she stopped returning my calls last month.
She said it was getting too intense
between us,
all that blood and exchange of bodily fluids.
She had a thing for latex.
I think that shows a fear of intimacy.
We only kissed twice the whole time
we were together.
Anyway, it's over now.
She won't even renew my prescription
for codeine.
And I'm left with this migraine
and an unnatural swelling behind my left ear.
My skin, it tingles
sometimes, along my fingertips.
I'm sure it's the precursor
to some sort of paralysis.
And the light, ah,
the light!
It scalds my eyes.
Makes them tear constantly.
This can't be normal.
Tell me, this can't be
normal.
Sex in Middle America
Moonlight clings
to a slip on a clothesline.
The light holds it like a dance partner
a hand around the waist
a knee nudging between knees.
The line sighs with brilliant expectation.
In the breeze
the lace hem
lifts
lifts
lifts
reaching with hips
and subtle
invisible groin
towards
the shivering moon.
Bite Me
The South African junkie
bites my breasts
with his broken teeth.
He refuses to believe
the bruises are from him.
I love him in exact proportion
to his disdain.
His rotting breath
flat ass
and constant farts
remind me of a dream
in which I ride a black donkey
in the mountains of a desert
and hit it with a switch.
With his arms around me
I can hear flies
as if we are already dead.
The Addict Renames the Days
This day is called Screamed myself hoarse at him
while I sat naked and fat on the futon.
The next day is called He punched his fist through
the wall and I kissed his broken knuckles.
The next is called I am too stoned to remember to
move when someone fucks us.
The next day is not called anything.
The next day is called My head is a snow globe
that’s been set on fire and is cracking.
This is followed by the day of Vomiting and regret.
The final day is I’m leaving you and getting a real life,
then the week starts over.
In the elevator
going up to your apartment
you jam your hand
down the front of my pants.
And I'm not wearing underwear.
This is sudden and
makes me wet
but I think you
close your eyes
not to see me
but to see yourself.
You're living
in your own
private porno flick.
I'm not starring.
I'm just an extra.
I'm just along for the ride.
Things that are Left at K-mart,
According my Dream on Wednesday
Stitches. Spines. Saints.
Folds of female flesh.
Waterlogged books, swollen pages spreading.
Scallops. Clams.
Seawater. Ski masks.
Hatchets. Tea leaves
in the shape of an anchor.
Long-legged blondes.
Window blinds.
Vikings. Mustaches.
Gold hoop earrings.
Plaid checks. Chocolate chip cookies.
unsets like pink daisies.
Mannequins with chipped lips.
The torso of a woman.
A marble quarry filled with rainwater.
The torso of a woman. My mother.
Black fingerprints.
The torso of a woman.
The rhinestone glasses she wore in college.
The Venus de Milo. Cumulus clouds.
My Venus. My torso.
The torso of a woman.
Dream Cats
My cats hate electricity.
They are scabby, fetid, dark.
They nose the alarm clock off the dresser.
They unplug the TV, the fan, the microwave.
My cats circle me in the dark,
teeth shining like
the memory of that night
the one I turn the lights on trying
to forget.
1,000 Words for Snow
Adolescent Anorexics:
can be nothing but a cliche,
their necks and waists
pared down to a commonality.
They are becoming feral and angelic,
Fur springing from their forearms and upper lips,
Cheerleaders with yellow and navy polyester croptops
revealing an emptiness,
Their hair
falling
like blond rain,
more giving up the scalp for the pillow
each morning.
The scent of vomit, bleach and strawberry
lip gloss
coalesces in front of them like
Skywriting bargaining with God, the body.
Their eyes burn like stomach acid
Their mouths drool uncontrollably at the refrigerator light.
They are reducing
To satin bows around necks, the texture
of new teddy bear fur, and
pink,
curling into an earlier and earlier knot,
Recapitulating into a
sparrow, a
fish, a
fishbone,
A wishbone of endless white ice,
or vast vanilla ice cream.
They are returning to something everyone remembers
But cannot say.
They are ivory novices in an abbey
with blood colored shadows,
prostrating themselves before
Before it happened
before the ever slower
beating organ, praying
for the final reversal of miracle.
And in their ears they always hear
the tinny ringing --
A scratchy voice from a swollen
Victrola, singing
of the snow-white
beauty of bones.
Getting Over
I keep his cigarette butts in my cereal bowl
on the kitchen table
next to the bottle of wine he drank.
It's become an acrid shrine to forgetting you.
A toast to his teeth gentle on my ribs,
to his thumb beckoning inside me
until you were just
healed bruises and
fingerprints.
It's a souvenir of his whispered
questions, my answers always
yes, yes,
with the breath of
a woman who has run a long way
to get to this place.
American Dream
This is a poem about a lawn.
It's green.
It's square.
It's flat where the chairs went in August.
There are dandelions.
A bulldog digs a hole and buries a hand,
buries a handball.
The lawn is mown at near regular intervals by
a flamboyant transsexual.
I mean a moody teenage boy.
The mower is gas powered and full of deadly thoughts.
The daughter of the house
ten
sniffs gasoline in the garage.
When she lies on the cool invasive concrete
the rafters full of her father's tools spin above her.
Later, she will become a moody teenage boy.
I mean a second grade teacher.
Until she marries a red haired man
who dies suddenly.
She finds herself feeling nothing and
questions the nature of her reality.
She's not real
so she doesn't question it for very long.
But this poem is not about her;
it's about her lawn
and she's ten and
hasn't turned into anything interesting for
the past 24 hours.
The lawn, however,
has become a sunset, a stick of flesh
and a tic in the gunman's lower eyelid.
Near midnight
it becomes a weeping man,
stands up and
walks out of this picture.
