You said that there was love in poison,
That there was love in suicide)
Then when Margaret left we asked,
Why not a single celebration,
Bright flowers and congratulations.
So we burned up all your Shakespeare,
And that fire forged a ring you let me slip around your finger,
we dressed your youth in white and put a veil over its eyes,
Fattened like a slaughter cow, at some fancy ball reception,
To cut its throat while you were sleeping.
When you woke you were a piece of art,
And asked if you were beautiful,
I laughed, ‘you’re just a storybook,
With wrinkles, scars and beauty marks’
And some curled up like smoke above
That goddamn yellow house,
And some ran off in straight fast lines,
Like the way we ran away,
Our denim matchbox pockets filled,
With heavy guilt and gasoline,
And there was happiness like Velcro,
That stuck my face to yours,
And when we died as one, a piece of art,
I knew of poison,
And the cancer of a wedding,
And the hot knives in the cake,
The cyanide in white champagne.
Chris Haug
Bovine Paranoia
I’m sure it’s different for everyone,
but for me, it began like this: You’re scared,
but you tell the Angus beside you
anyway, and he just snorts dismissively
says that in profile
faces only look like they’re winking.
But you’re unconvinced,
and you don’t want to bring
it up again, but it keeps happening.
The sheep start doing it, and pigs
do it, too; then a farmer does it, then a tractor,
and the worries you feel about what
others will think are eventually outweighed
by what all of this means for you
if what you think you’re seeing
is actually happening. Your four stomachs
churn each time you catch someone’s eye,
until you finally can’t take it anymore,
and you dare to speak about this phenomena
with others, but of course, that psychotic
Guernsey pipes up and says
you’re the one who’s way off base.
And everyone laughs, but
no one knows what to do,
and you think, What else can you do,
but speak up? See, whether or not
you’ve accurately remembered
the moment last week when you saw
the wheat field winking at you
just before it began to rain . . .
you’re sure there was a flash
and then finally, definitively—
thunder. Yes, it now occurs to you
that the only thing that’s really true
is that you’re soggy and uneasy,
and that there is no way
you’re going to be able to spend
every single moment
of a lifetime of afternoons
like this.
Loss
It’s never how we imagine:
a daughter can, perhaps,
see her father returning
home from a long year
in a dusty place, his beard
matted with black blood,
his eyelids locked tight.
Though she knows
this won’t be how she will
actually see him when he returns,
it’s a way
to prepare herself.
But loss sneaks out
from the dark corners
of a Thursday morning
when her mother
doesn’t wake her
for school, and her hero
father comes back early
with his hair neatly trimmed
and his oaky legs unscarred.
Months pass in silence,
and she finds that the only things
her father can bring himself to touch
for more than just a moment
are the creamy shells of eggs
sleeping peacefully
as the dull kitchen lights
buzz somewhere overhead.
In Havelock’s Pub—Nairn, Scotland
I’m pretty sure it’s English
he’s speaking, but I can’t make out
a word, so I’m nodding
and drinking, trying to hide this fact.
His words are a deluge
and his eyebrows arc into caterpillars
as his leathered hand points
like a gun: forefinger at my empty
glass, thumb at the ceiling.
I nod, and a smile burrows out
from beneath his gray mustache.
He laughs as he bangs my pint glass
on the bar three times.
The bartender nods.
Apparently, I’ve just ordered
another drink.
I don’t know what he saying,
but I want to believe he’s telling me
how he survived the war
and how he learned to talk about it
once it was over, that he’s speaking
about how hard the rain fell
the day he met his wife, about how soft
her hands were the first time
she touched his shipwrecked face,
and that he’s confiding in me
that sometimes the sea
seems to unfold itself
only to him.
I Learn Prince Harry’s Junk is Going To Be in the Newspaper
—after Frank O’Hara
Apparently, he was gyrating away
and then suddenly he stopped singing
and dancing to flip off the camera
and you said there was thunder
from across the sea, the Queen’s anger
you said. And I said
but thunder pounds you in the chest
hard, so it was not really thunder
and there was no lightning,
but I was in such a panic about “news”
like this permeating the air
about how “society” was acting
precisely like the sea
churning and foaming
that I saw a newsman
levitating, mid-air
on a forty-foot television screen say,
“Prince Harry is naked in Vegas!”
And look, I know I haven’t been
to that many casinos,
but even I know saints aren’t canonized
at Caesar’s, and I know there are no comets
seen in the Bellagio’s bathroom.
I have, however, had my picture in the paper.
O Prince Harry, we love you
please put your clothes on.
Kimberly M. Russo
The Home Depot
Even the inclined plane
we walk,
mirrors our journey.
Together . . . but worlds apart.
You’ve found a replacement,
Iron Man.
I am isolated,
Recluse.
You speak of new opportunities,
options.
The lump in my throat,
Nostalgia.
Automatic doors offer
solutions,
An immense warehouse of
answers.
Materials promise repair,
neglected.
Tools for the taking,
untouched.
You say, it’s my chance to
start over.
I can re-introduce myself,
sever ties.
(Like some defective product
made-over . . .
manufactured and marketed to a
top-drawer buyer.)
I am looking back, refusing to
let go.
You are looking forward, choosing
your future.
In a wall of stacked boxes, an empty niche,
Sylvia’s oven.
I pour myself inside and cover
my face.
My last visit to this “House of
Improvement”
left me on a short
rope
Tethered to “experts” of
the mind
and memories of the child
within.
With their shelves of
tools
and crates of
drugs,
what did they really
fix?
Sobbing in the presence of the
Hydrangeas,
I exit through the door we entered
together.
You pay for the filter to clear our
water
and leave by the alternate route.
Wreckage
My house survived the storm.
Damaged, undoubtedly . . .
but still upright.
Tearing through our home,
collecting seemingly random items,
an escort to oblivion.
Debris left behind . . . stacks of books
and their hopeful characters,
unshelved, displaced.
With force enough to eject furnishings,
and thorough enough
to pack your toothbrush,
You’ve left me
with the wreckage
and empty spaces.
Joint-Custody
Rolling suitcases and repurposed gift bags,
stuffed with clothes and memories.
How did we get here?
Four kids and two homes and six bruised souls.
The numbers don’t make sense to the heart.
Noted mistakes, tally marks in your mind,
engraved on my conscience
strike-over the ink of promises.
Years of shared dreams and intimate moments,
have you fled so discreetly?
I see you bleeding through the parchment
refusing to give up.
Don’t you realize, it’s too late?
The suitcases and their innocent handlers
are gone.
Definitive Definition
Keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss;
sharp sorrow; painful regret . . .
So reads the definition of
Grief.
Mental suffering.
Steady weight presses my mind against the confines of my skull from the moment I wake until the moment I wake,
punctuated throughout the day by a hammer that yields ruthless force.
Sharp sorrow.
It found me below my ribcage today.
Staring at the lumps of packaged chicken, I inhaled through my teeth
and knew I could not side-step its arrival.
Painful regret.
Cooking for one is a parody of normalcy.
And not bitter, nor sharp, nothing tastes so bland
As grief.
An Unsubtle Metaphor
The pages turned, and I hadn’t tended to them ... at all ... just like the garden in the backyard. Neither of us spent a portion of our time clearing out the dried up messes, or planting new seeds, or even watering the life that existed despite our neglect. Now, the hour is late, the brittle leaves are the foundation of the plot, any recent growth withered beneath the truth of daylight, and neither of us seems able to produce a seed of hope.
Darling, Dearest,
quite neglectful,
How does your garden grow?
It doesn’t.
End of chapter.
•
I weeded the “garden” today — If you call a few strawberry plants fighting for space amid a jungle of tree-sized weeds a garden. It was hot. I wore gloves to protect me from the thorns, but some of them pierced deep enough to bring blood. I had to bend and squat and assume a variety of uncomfortable positions. Sweat kept finding its way to sting my eyes, and my hands were dirty, and several times, I wanted to quit. I thought about rushing through it, kind of half-assed ... you know? ... just focusing on the enormous stalks that even the neighbors recognize. Instead, meticulously, I plucked the tiniest sprouts, one at a time, until their remains formed a sizeable pile. Even as I pulled the last clinging root from the earth, I knew that tomorrow new stems would break through the dirt. The labor was long and detailed, and no one was around to notice what I had done. Standing upright, I admired the boxed plot of overturned soil and the cleared stone pathway. I’d forgotten how lovely it was.
Holly Walrath
Elegy for a Body
I take up ashes
like taking up space.
I am dis-embodying my body
or what I once called skin,
its remnants rounding out,
the insides of a blue funeral urn
whose curves make sense.
Inside here with me
the afreet’s ghost
and the memory of feeling thin
like a butterfly’s wing
like water in a glass pitcher
like telephone wires
filled with energy
of the me I remember only
in the soft nail beds
and crane’s neck
and boy’s chest
of yesterday.
Two-Hundred-Fifty Seven
I have eaten 942 sunflower seeds
(roasted, unsalted, in-shell)
and written 257 words today, today
I have told the character in the science
fiction novel that he will die, and
he has responded with the
casual and unbroken flick of a middle
finger between his teeth. Today
I imagined several haikus that could
not really be defined as such but
at least they looked pretty, in a nice
little block shape like literary wood
engravings on sheepskin or the desperate
secret note of a fugitive, squeezed
onto the back of a postage stamp. Today
I revisited the scene in the back
of the black pick-up with the blood
on the floorboards, concealed by the
litter of cigarette butts, coins and receipts
and reckless cell phones that will
not stop ringing hip hop ring tones. Today
the pregnant girl, wooed by the stack
of gold rings upon the older man’s
fingers, will not escape into the thick
crowd of New York bodies and mist
that lies at their feet like death’s
odor, she will not deface her
rapist, branding him for the bastard
he is with the hush of the gun. Today
instead of beginning anew I instead
made honey lemon herbal tea, which
was so hot that I had to drop a tiny
ice cube into its surface, which refused
to melt away anyway, but at least today
I managed to recreate the sound
between my teeth when my pursed lips
hit my tongue and the cat comes running
besides which the noise of perfect
silence.
I Think My Taste is Questionable
In my childhood, I ate one ninety-nine cent candy bar a day.
Walking home from the gas station,
a cold Dr. Pepper between my legs as I jumped
the fence behind the woods. I had a panache
for Smarties, hoarded at Halloween,
and I would slowly bite their white rims
until
a hard heart remained.
In my teens, ahead of my time, I drank Jello shots
that gulped down, formed a strange pile
like gummy bears at the bottom of my self-respect.
At the movies I ordered tubs of popcorn
and sour patch kids, and sat in the back row with my friends,
dreaming about the projectionist, and his freckles.
In my twenties I smoked clove cigarettes,
coiled in brown paper, little love letters
chased them with orange sour Altoids,
which at first glittered with a layer of diamond white dust
but later, in the hot car on a Texas day
congealed into sticky sweet oblivion.
In my thirties I developed a taste for pickles
and sunflower seeds, the latter’s shrouds littering
my desk, in the cracks of the couch and my bra,
the former folded in white paper, saved for later,
always in secret, to avoid uncomfortable questions.
Will I take up pig’s feet in my forties? Perhaps
kimchee and caviar? Will I finally mature a taste
for Grape Nuts, like my father? Or will I swill
a diet coke with brunch like my mother?
Or perhaps, the tawny suicide
of a whisky bottle
kept close at hand,
under my pillow
like a tooth for my
guardian fairy?
Like my brother?
The Ghost of a Living Man
Sometimes, I see a man who looks
like my brother, in the parking lot
of a Wal-Mart, or a grocery store.
Mostly seedy places.
He’s got a shaved head—his ears poke out
and there’s a gray shadow of once thick,
richly dark hair. He wears an oversized
tee shirt, always black, usually a band
or a video game. His beer gut hangs
out beneath it—like a bee hive
on a skinny oak tree.
He wears faded jean shorts. There’s a sko
ring in the back pocket, or a pack of cigarettes.
His legs poke out beneath like
little bird stalks. He wears combat boots
or torn-up sneakers and clean white socks.
Sometimes he has a tattoo.
His hands shake.
I think—there goes the ghost of a living man.
Estranged brothers can haunt you that way.
A Tourist of Sorts
I am rediscovering you, in pieces.
In black and tan voices behind
gray partitions, tongue on tongue.
Syllables made American, New England.
In the retelling of Joyce on sky lit stairwells
Irish men and women, pride in the morning,
“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.”