HUSK

So, I am quiet, and the chorus of dead things
rasps at my borders; dried husks, withered wheat. This is not night, but a forward hush of senses.
Deliver me of this, weighted by objects
I accumulate, these skirts which lift so gently,
their breath spelled out in dust.

CRUSADE

Bumper stickers proclaim
the wonders of the salt mines,
stretch their beckoning ribbons
across a continent.

Crusader ghosts wander
the outskirts of the great pyres,
their grey armor transparent.

A last radio crackles,
"No solution left
but to burn it all down!"

A man wavers, numb but jubilant.
I have never heard a voice
clearer than his as he sings,
"Match sticks, match heads.
Light me up--I'm ready to go!"

THREAD

My brother stands, a shepherd in wool-cap,
on the rough concrete stage of a half-finished housing tract.
He tells how a single lash of long white thread
could trick an angel down the sink-hole, how we could
tangle its wings with soda pull-tabs, then keep track
of it by its jangle and clank, how if that doesn't work,
we could do the same thing to a cat.

We both forgot what we were thinking
by the time we got home for dinner.

SCHEMATIC

I see eager bodies wasted beneath bed sheets,
late-shadow buses taking strangers to a place
where they ring the cord, Stop.
Street lights are the split-open veins of night.
This is a place that still sleeps.
What is cold was once warm.

Factories in their steady grease of silence, the old man drunk on the porch-step, letting
secrets slip, broken electronic bits swept off
the work floor, and in the dust
his grand-kids make turtle-shells, dinosaur bones
from the brittle shavings he brings home.

CYCLONE FENCES

Tapping toward the forest grove; we make up the trees as we go, past the floodlights and the blue
crinkled tarpaulin-covered swimming pools;
All of us in depraved backyards, by rust-colored
monotonous teeth of picket fences, wanting to poke
each other in the eye, thinking of the schoolyard,
its’ wider green boundaries marked by gym sneakers
and dull grey chain-link, bulging in certain places,
as if a tremendous force tried to find its way through.
“They don't call ‘em cyclone fences for nothing!”
(Dad said that)

Lipstick, pencil stubs, charcoal gravel kicked up
by the track team. Panties stained with algae beneath the bleachers. The sixth grade choral group,
the girl in the green wool sweater let her breasts rest on the beaten piano as they did their recital. My eyes could take in nothing else. If only
they marked holidays by events like these:
The Day I Discovered Breasts,
The Day When Sulfur Met the Match Head. The impossible maps we go crawling to.

HUNGER PSALM

I know my pores will open.
Swell toward that hunger, radiant.
To cling to any warm, uncertain body
like it was a fragment of the Creator. Rapture just a matter of letting go.

ARTIFACT

Here is my father, his waste, his skin shed and there in that old photo, his smile shining out like a religious artifact kneecaps exposed like undernourished fruit
waiting to harden into knobby posts
to fit the bristling trousers
of work and surrender, thrust off for the sex that would claim my first breathe.

Here is the father I could have wrestled to the ground, taught curse words to by the blasting heat of the old family furnace.
Here is the father I could have raced left breathless and expectant by the oak tree
his smile spread taut, teeth glinting
with the words he almost said
didn't say, will never say to me.

THREE WITCHES…

…stand at the cross roads.

One holds a branch, the other a rose, the last a knife.
Our lips move from each to each.
It’s no wonder, the blood that comes when we finally speak.

When we finally say something, isn’t it always the least?

TEETH AND INSIGHT

I have grown to know the world was once water,
the Grand Canyon a trickle in dinosaur-times,
my teeth once fangs, my eyes sulfur lamps
scanning jungle ferns for the first hint of danger.

I used to hide behind naugahyde fringes of the living
room couch, to sneak the last scenes of Star Trek
while my sister and her boyfriend furiously tongued each other above. I was that close to the forbidden.

I saw how a man could dissolve in a beam of blinding white light.

A TUNE

Something was hungry in me, and I denied it.
I proved I could outlast the snow and the outrage.
Grasping the frosted bottle, I shouted, "Fuck you to hell, Jim-Lee!"
Strung some piano wire between my teeth,
strummed a tune on it, at first cheerful, later a dirge.
Got a cup full of nickels for it, because people
like to be reminded how quick the turning can be.