Poetry
Suppose He hung the fruit
on the highest thorny branch.
Ascetic, stripped
of its rind
by Heaven’s gustings,
its stained-glass flesh
denuded and mateless.
Unbuttressed save
its tenuous stem,
do you think it still would long
to taste the lips of
virgin genesis?
Of course it would.
Had He not said
Be fruitful and multiply?
The serpent was merely a matchmaker.
After the rain passes,
lay out on the wet grass.
Feel your clothes soak:
seat of your pants,
back of your thighs,
shoulderblades pressed
into the damp earth.
Hold your palms over
the blades of grass
re-greening, newly sharp,
prickles of the ground
washed clean of the dust.
Breathe the scrubbed air,
forget smog haze and
runoff sheen, lay out
on the wet grass
and feel the Earth
healing herself.
What can I say about your bones?
Your collarbones are empty bookshelves,
your visible ribs a pair of ladders
abandoned against a wall.
Hip bones like door knobs,
legs and arms like naked curtain rods.
Brittle fingernails like broken paving stones
leading up to the rickety porch of your mouth.
Your hair a tangle of desiccated ivy,
creeping along the trellis of your shoulders,
and, my god, this skin like fading flaking paint.
Moving past, I can’t help but slow
and peer in wonder at you.
A house not kept full soon falls into ruin,
but I know it’s not too late to restore you,
if only you would let anyone in your
locked and creaking door.
I wish I could
climb these
red ladders,
climb every story
behind every cut,
and find you
at the top of your
tower of pain.
I wish I could
bring you the
smallest gem
of bright and
ardent peace.
Tiny,
but
bright.
I want to enter your lips
doors of crushed red fruit
and crush your lush lips
against me.
Your hips beneath my hand
crush the red mattress,
your hips, flushed
like your lips and your lips,
move for me,
moan for me,
gush from the crush of your lips,
rosy waves on a velvet sea
for me, for me.
Korean DMZ, 1964
The line runs straight
through the middle of the room.
It is marked out on the walls,
through the tiles of the floor,
through a painted line
that divides the table in half.
Stone-faced men sit on one side
staring at stone-faced men
on the other. Ostensibly,
they are negotiating,
but no one says anything.
A junior aide fidgets,
carelessly allows his pen
to roll across the table.
Everyone stares it.
After a silence, someone
makes a joke about defection.
No one laughs. No one laughs,
and the aide never dares
to retrieve his pen.
Conjoined twins, once separated,
often remark of phantom pains
running the length of the scar.
Here is what you must do:
Sleep with lions
and sleep with whales.
Part seas.
Part these
duo-mothered sons.
Shear your empowering locks.
Tear blocks from Jericho’s walls.
Slay giants.
Don’t look back.
Don’t look back.
Pluck fruit from the tree
and crack your paling Eden:
I have paved the road with thorns
and laid brambles for your
soul.
A girl walks by
wearing lime green
fairy wings:
glitter mesh net
stretched over wire.
In her hands,
a blue electric
sweeper,
dorm-sized,
and a basket of
Bath & Body Works
finest products.
A moment’s glance
diverts my gaze
and when it returns,
the Fairy Queen
of Vacuums and
Loofahs is gone.
Her absence is a lullaby,
crooning this town
into summer’s
sticky hibernation.
Your father called out for you,
and we scrambled for our clothes.
I found mine first, jerked my
swim trunks on and watched you,
heart thudding in my throat,
hop on one brown leg to fish
your sand-crusted foot through
the leg-hole of your bikini.
The sharp point of a stowaway shell
burned a hole in my thigh.
Your father rounded the rock,
and found us standing,
wide-eyed, surrounded by jellyfish
washed up on the shore.
Breathless, we blamed
our crimson faces on the sun,
blamed the sweat sliding down
your belly and my back on the heat.
As we followed him back to the others,
in your eyes, I saw you clamshelling
our interrupted moment,
our secret in the sand.
As we snuck away from your sister’s
overwrought wedding reception,
you speared a cube of cheddar
out of a diminishing bowl of salad and
concealed it in your small mouth, like
a sleek otter snatching river trout,
and then you touched your finger
to your lips and grinned at me, as if
that tiny cube were as much a secret
as our stealthy breathless kisses
behind the garden trellis.