Category Archives: Poetry

Spice Shop

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This spring afternoon,
the sun through the windows
warms old barn-beam shelves
and glass jars full of spices
with names like small poems:

pink peppercorn, red saffron,
turmeric and star anise,
and bulbs of blooming teas,
of jasmine and globe amaranth,
yellow osmanthus
ready to steep and unfurl.

The owner is writing
the spice of the month
on a chalkboard so old I think
it must have been salvaged from
some one-room schoolhouse
of a bygone era.

(tart sumac, cherry-dark,
measured out in little hills
on squares of brown paper,
if you’re wondering)

There is a sacred quiet here,
an honest stillness,
like a prayer you can taste
in the fragrant heat of
cinnamon and dried chiles,
in bold cumin and mustard,
in every tiny seed of fennel
and black sesame.

Wet

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Some poems are not meant for the page.
They are meant for cups and bowls.
They are meant to be poured out
onto the floor or dashed off the bedside table
by rampant elbows.

They are made for splattering,
for long rivulets dripping down the walls
like watercolors or alcohols
or to be drunk, to get drunk upon
and stumble, tipsy and blurry-eyed,
slurring out through the lips
and encouraging bad decisions.

They are poems meant to taste
like paint: pigmented and thick,
or watery and slick thin,
but poems that recolor you
from the inside out, just the same.

They are poems like slurry and mud, meant
to hold footprints, meant to be tracked through
and ruin your mother’s just-cleaned linoleum,
poems that can be followed by
those who come in your wake.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Wash

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After dancing all night,
you left open the bathroom door.
I can see parts of you in the mirror.
I watch you unpaint yourself.

You stand at the sink, unbloused,
you remove the tiny baubles
of your earrings, you remove your pearls.
You take the pins from your hair,
you let it tumble down —
I wish I were the shadow of your hair,
full of the fatal scent of you,
guilty of tangles, guilty of a murmur
on your shoulder, your neck.

You wet a cloth.
You wipe away blush and eyeliner,
cleanse foundation and contour,
dark mascara,
the sinful deep rose of your lips.
You confess your skin,
you whisper the truth of your skin.

You step out of your heels,
tired ball and arch of your feet
uncradled and returned to cool tile.
You tiptoe from view

into the hot susurrus of the shower,
and leave me only with imagination:
I imagine you, enveloped in downpour,
in suds, in scents of sandalwood and wild orange.
I imagine you sponge away sweat and perfume,
soap and heat tumbling out of the dark
confession of your hair.

I imagine all places you wash:
hungry rib and live collarbone,
kindled breast and hot belly,
thigh, fevered vulva,
imagine my hands as washrags,
my hands as steam.

I cannot wait for you to finish.
I lie and listen to you bathe,
I am tense with desire for you.

Bring your body back to me,
its blemishes uncovered,
its shape adored sans adornment,
let me untowel you,
let me lick the cleanliness from your spine.

I want you without decoration,
without pigments or jewels,
only with the red flowers
only with the purple gems
my mouth will paint on your skin.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Buddha in the Garden of Waste

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You go inside for more drinks,
and I wander your garden.

You have left it to weed over.
Old perennials suck desperate
at the slums of the soil.
A plastic windmill sways
on a rusty stem, one vane lost.
All the rest hang their faded heads.

I found a fat Buddha
in a tangled flower bed;
hands upturned,
he invites the seasons back,
ever the optimist;
he laughs even as a vine
wraps her hands around his neck.

I’d like to reincarnate this garden.
I’d like to pull up
the clotbur and the crabgrass,
lay down fertile new soil,
plant dozens of little bombs
ready to explode in spring.

I’d scrub fat Buddha
and let him breathe. I’d fix the windmill,
I’d make barren into beautiful

but when you wobbled back,
with drinks in your hands,
I decided I always try
to fix wasted gardens,
and not this time, not this time.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Bucket List

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You asked me once
if there was a list of things
I wanted to accomplish before
I died.

My list is so long.

I want to wander it all:
Arashiyama, Giant’s Causeway,
the glowworm caves of Waitomo.
Even the old coal mines
of Bibb County, Alabama,
even the cracked streets
of backwater towns no one
visits anymore but coyotes
and weeds.

I want to explore all the secrets
this world tucks into her rocky deserts,
into her wild grasslands, into the valleys
and caverns slung beneath her blue sea belly
like stretchmarks three days after
a new mother gives birth.

I want to write a thousand books
about all the beauty I’ve discovered,
about all the raw ugly beauty of us,
and buy with them a place
among my idols,

and if I can’t,
I want to subvert them:

to scrawl 10,000 poems
like graffiti into the walls of buildings
on every continent on this planet,
even goddamn Antarctica.

I want to hack the airwaves
and interrupt these
regularly scheduled programs,
to interject poem
after wild guerilla poem
between the nightly pundits
and the shitty sitcoms
and the car insurance commercials.

I want to experience weightlessness,
to slip the chains of orbit
and see the world the way asteroids do,
to fling my poems down from satellites
and watch them burn up like cinders
in the atmosphere or crash into cities
leaving craters so smoking and wide
they can never be forgotten.

I want schoolchildren to know my name;
I don’t give a damn if it’s for greatness
or for infamy.

All these grandiose things
are never going to happen.
But truth is, I don’t need
any of them to be content:

Let me hold your hand every night
for the rest of my life, even if
my fingers grow arthritic and gnarled.

Let me kiss you every morning
for the rest of my life,
even if, in my old age,
I forget the sound of your name.

Let me write for you
one little poem every day:
a haiku, a cherita, a rhyming couplet,
if that’s the only thing I can muster out.
I just want a poem for you
as the last words
to breathe past my lips.

That’s all I need.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

The Tabby Cat and the Dormouse

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The tabby in the garden by the fence
wriggles low, tweaks his whiskers to sense
the grey dormouse
by the red henhouse
but rain falls sudden and intense:

a bucketful of cloud drops downpour,
so the tabby, bedraggled and poor,
slinks off to dry
his whiskers and sigh
at laughing mouse in henhouse door.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Bigger

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There is a boy whose name
you’ll make yourself forget
but you’ll remember what he looks like:

taller than you, yellow blond hair,
a smile white as plastic silverware,
he’s the reason you don’t date
girls with blue eyes for years.

After gym class,
he saunters over to the corner
of the lunch room table
you are sitting at alone.
He cups his hands in front of his chest,
shakes them up and down,
and shouts at you: Hey! fat fuck!
did you forget your bra today?
His friends bray like donkeys,
and your face is as red
as the slimy spaghetti on your plate.
You don’t say anything.

You hunker down,
bend your shoulders in —
you’ll regret this later–
you hunker down,
and stare into your pasta
until he gets bored and goes away,
and then you stuff your face
and go to class, hoping no one
hears your belly gnaw at
the mouthfuls of shame
you just shoveled into it.

Your English teacher
reads the poems you write
and pulls you into his office. He says,
Look, you’re gonna grow out of this.
You’re not gonna be this way forever,

and you clench your eyes
because you don’t want to think
about how this bulk of a boy
can grow bigger,
how you can broaden,

he’s got to know that
growth is only beautiful
when it happens to flowers,
and you spend more time thinking
of how to mow yourself down.

Anyway, your teacher’s a liar:
this never stops;
you will always carry more
than your fair share.

You’ll sway with it.
You’ll wake up a man
with creaky knees
and red streaks on your hips
from years of tight waistbands.
You’ll stand naked in front of mirrors,
thinking about gravity
and the colors of stretched skin.
You straighten your back
until it aches.

The years give you something, though:
white static where the blond boy’s name goes,
the warm skin of lovers who teach you
you are not too wide to be cared for,
and over years of yourself,
you chewed the moisture out
of that belly full of shame:

it’s dry tinder now.

You swallowed a cinder called poetry
to try to burn yourself out,

but this big kiln contains it and roars.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Asphalt

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You shout like air
and my ears are full of it.
Soundless. Buffeting.

I am seven years old
and clenching my hands
and my eyes in the street.

Listening for cars
and counting backwards
from ten, nine, eight, seven

They avoid me
every time sometimes
sometimes swerving
close enough I can feel
their big metal bodies
from six, five, four, three
brush by

their tires crunch
on the side of the road

but it quiets you
and I never get to one.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.