THE IMPORTANCE OF SHOES
The pages of war elapsed.
It is good to be among decay
To ponder the stupidity of the hunt
To face the ruin of years past
Stare at the holes in your shoes.
Why stand with a magnifying glass against a dumb bug
That wants nothing more but to go forward
Find some life and devour it.
After that, it is leaves in the face, mud in the hair
Defeat on the edge of a cliff.
But wait, a young person’s guitar coos beyond your grasp
The fight is thick with swagger, sway, and kiss.
The wind blows castles from your arms.
The tide plants your knees in the dirt.
It is possible to stand up to any asshole in the bar
Skinny, drunk, inflated with the dignity you must provide for yourself
And become some toothy beast of a thing,
Hands cocked around a glass pitcher.
RECOVERED NOTES IN BIRD AND LOVER
I see purple when I open my mouth
And it fills again with roses.
Between my legs, sails
A pirate ship child breath sheet of fog.
I pull bird after bird from my throat
How much for this quilted, cursing sparrow?
The back of a woman's calves,
The piano-key stutter of daughters
Holding the dustpan for pennies.
I am not among many that crawl
Out of the halo of days that grow wild with wind.
We were on a park bench filled with wonder
The tennis balls swam around our heads like planets,
The wide berth of your forehead in my forehead
What is music to a woman
If not recovered notes in bird and lover.
ELEGY FOR JOB IN A SKIRT
Eyes heavy under the hammer and sickle,
The cleft of your bang-soft hat, Marina—
Those grief-bangled eyes.
I want to know what is left
After this lonely, leggy pout
Has put the years on us.
I pull you into the room
Shake you, ask for eyelets like wells
To hold the moon.
(Hang her again!
Someone who loves you
Called you Job
In a skirt).
My shoe flies off.
You are the bedside table scattering light
Your body is a dangerous shoe
Unlaced on the sill—
White, green, blue.
Marina,
The ocean is filling up your shoes.
CITY PERFUMED WITH WOMEN
Does a simple woman’s musk on the subway
Conjure up the universe of sensual and miraculous scents?
Certainty of smell finds you, leaves you
And finds you again, like the twin willow stumps I loved as a child
Maybe because there were two of them
And they faced the tawny backside of neglect
As they were arrested from the yard.
You could smell the disturbance of neglect in mother’s hands
The briny pinch of oysters still bathing in salt nearby
The itch of the soil under the grid and rapture of years
And now, sitting next to the slow mutation of a woman’s collarbone –
Paper doors between war and chance
I remember bourbon and rain
The year I sat in windows.
The pungent contract of lust
In the calm waters of the lonely.
And as she shifts her weight on the scratched plastic bench
Of a greasy train spilling over the tracks,
Bodies peppered with wage and heat.
REUNION
The broken-down dream never recovered,
A painted egg rotting in the bush.
I lift it from the ground like an old woman, a weak thing
That needs a rose pinned to her collar for the reunion.
Happiness is a man pushing a shopping cart,
Uphill and buoyant with pork skins.
It is anything to bring you back to the place
Where you were not stuck in a barrel, weeping in a jar,
A sigh scooped out in you the size of a human ear.
This is when I die and become an ocean.
All the food tastes good.
The money is more than I counted on.
And whatever the blue, blue blanket
Of the best and worst night of my life was
That is what I am sleeping on tonight.
-
Laura Minor lives and works in Brooklyn as a poet,
professor, and singer/songwriter. She received her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence
College and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pebble Lake Review,
Apalachee Quarterly, Mantis, elevator, JMWW and Kalliope. Laura is currently at
work on a novel with her chapbook, "Made of Bone, Music & Time,"
forthcoming from Pudding House Press in spring 2010.