Poetry
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.
Before her hip gave out,
my cat used to make
a mad dash from one
end of the house to the
other, as if some invisible
dog were snapping at her
heels.
It would begin in the bedroom,
where two hours of lying
in a warm square of sunlight
would break in a sudden panic,
as if she had just remembered
that the stove was left on
or the garage door wide open,
and she would gallop out the
bedroom door, leap at the threshhold
and land, drifting like a street racer,
through the hardwood curve of the
living room.
Where her flight ended,
I’ve never known, but moments
later, she would rush back,
flop into the square of light,
and sleep, feline heart fluttering.
This is a fragile thing.
This belly full of a musketballs.
Bleed your blue and grey,
but don’t forget your brother’s knife
the one your father gave him.
Snap the fragile edge
against your throat
Mother, won’t you tend this wound,
stitch the ragged ends together
the suture is a chasm
the chasm is a scalpel cut
and I don’t remember the surgeon’s name
but I remember your brother’s knife,
I remember your brother’s wife
and the child they stitched
this family with.
She kissed me.
Kerosene tongue under a charcoal sky,
and what could I do
but burn? But yearn
for more of that
thistle fire tingle on my lips.
She kissed me.
I could melt glaciers with this.
September, 1918
It has been a year,
two months, five days
and this morning
since last my eyes
were full of you.
I do not know where
your head last slept,
where last you stepped,
where your body
my god save it
carries you right now.
I cannot even hear
the guns from here.
I cannot even hear them
and the post man
never brings news.
I am going out to sea.
I have stolen father’s boat
and a hundred bottles
from the milk man’s shop.
I will sail out as far as I dare
and fill the sea with them
and beg the world to spin
a bottle into your hands,
in every one, a letter to you
and a lock of my hair.
I have shorn it all off!
I have worried it out
and I have torn it out
and you may not think
me beautiful when
you finally come home
my god bring him home
but at least you will be home
and I hope, I hope safely.
Last night,
I chopped down a cedar tree,
only its trunk
was your trunk,
and your belly its bark,
and the arc of the axe
my whetstone tongue.
A waterfall spilled out
and black goldfish too,
hundreds of them,
a pregnancy of tiny scaled gods,
pouring all down your thighs
black goldfish flashes
and every time
I kissed your trembling lips
they’d ignite and burn to ashes.
The fish, I mean,
because your lips no longer burn,
but I kissed them all the same
until all your black goldfish
whirled in white ash eddies
like snow dust around us.
What left to do
but what next I did?:
I put them back,
packed the crack in your bark
with the burnt snow
of all the tiny goldfish
you spilled onto my tongue.
You are a little like a brass birdcage:
a cherry-red cardinal inhabits you,
but even if your door were left open,
it would not spread its wings, it would not
sing, it would only linger on its perch,
plumed head tucked, waiting for the
night’s veil to cover you and bury
it within shadow’s silent smother.
If only the birdcage were not there;
if only.
Peleliu, October 1944
The clouds black out the moon.
We skitter in pairs, Makoto & I.
At the first foxhole,
a dark shape rises up
and I do what they taught me:
I thrust the bayonet in,
just beneath the diaphragm,
into the space where the breath
and the body meet.
The American rolls over.
He doesn’t scream,
the way men usually do.
When I pull my bayonet free,
there is just one long
grooooooooaaaaaaaaann,
like there is a big bag of
sorrow in his belly and
all of it is pouring out,
all pouring out
with the rest of him.
He shudders once
and never moves again.
Makoto’s eyes are white ghosts.
Shaking, we move on to
the next dark foxhole.