Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

Derelict Girl

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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.

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

Crush

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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.

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

Conjoined / Separated

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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.

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

Commandments

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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.

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

College Town Move Out Day

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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.

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

Clamshell

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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.

Cheddar

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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.

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

Cat

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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 poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Caesarean

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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.

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