I ZIMBRA DORSIMBRA
Armed with nothing really, ink & cold-pressed
paper, we’ll give what we’ve got when it’s time.
A villanelle, sweet rubaiyat unless
collateral damage impedes our deadline.
Morning shots at Velo Rouge
seems like Dada is born-again
out of found materials and genderqueers—
producing dissent instead of flesh.
War is a timeline, a spectrum of debt.
More than where we are, what matters is what
we make. If we didn’t write poems, then
we’d be doing nothing really, barren & cold-pressed.
SIGHTINGS
Threadbare ligaments that join muscle and flesh
tether my bones—both ankle and wrist
while throbbing cuvée aged exactly
a score plus four cools from outside in
like winter air under the door.
This bodily response, although routine
I suppose, creates chaos beneath skin and renders
these red cells senseless. A smiling fist as if
threatening square teeth quickens vein traffic—
first hot then cold spoiling an ever delicate repose.
There was that time on the street,
us both tied to animals. Your pace was smooth
like the braided silk strands between where dog
and hand meet. You were in flight, a bird swallowing
air. Goldenrod under rust, I was deciding the color
of your hair.
I was calm when we passed and silently
I asked: Have you been where I have been? Laughing
in that paint-stripped chair? Only yesterday
I was there collecting mementos, eating my words,
and loudly pointing out the intolerably unfair.
I saw you from across the bar
adrift in a mass of recognizable faces, names
mostly unattached. They faded in and out,
their voices rising and falling, pulsing with the
vodka and coffee appetites of small town night life.
From the corner of your black-tipped eye,
you checked my gaze and I wavered,
unconnected to the floor, improvising
squeezing green glass while my infant tongue practiced
swallowing bubbles that fought their way down my closing throat.
I’ll never know whether your head has rested
on a fragrantly familiar bed, softened with love
almost made to last, or, skin that smells like soap I bought.
I am without a stake to claim while these sightings
FOX LIFE
This fox jaw went slack like
a small, but able-bodied carnivore
feasting on the fleshy words
of its mate. My black-eyed sight
holds tight your familiar
frame. With horns at my hind,
I skipped a pace. On foot
and in heart. A tuft of dull red
wavered, windy and stick-straight,
but the galloping rhythm holds
steady. Fox-life without it
could prove to be deadly
for this chase and the next.
I’ve been outrun this time,
the prick of thistles at my chest.
MINERAL
Our boots stain the hardwood but no one takes offense.
Women wait & smoke cigarettes on the front stoop
sometimes rolling up their slacks to examine a prickly leg.
Heard them say snow in May is the poor man’s manure,
“where parrot tulips come from”
but none of us know if this is true.
Heard about the iron in the soil, the blood on her skirts.
It’s mud season and Hubbard Park is red
in anticipation of the rain, and we are hungry for dinner.
THE TWINS
The twins are blonde this summer,
hair amber as the poolside beer.
There is a cannonball
and then another. Companions
in cell-division, bath-time, and lacrosse
conjoined by an invisible part specific to neither
boy nor girl. They conspire in the deep end—
coordinate their play,
assign who will hold their breath,
who will wait, tread, count
pennies rusting
under water. They do not beg to be observed
aside a few backward glances:
the shallow end where one-pieced mothers
bronze, pages of Harlequin romances
turn under water-proof lashes.
One twin leaps
from the navy tiled ledge,
the other stands back,
observes, endures the splash.
He sinks
with force, his breath
kept still at the center of his body,
willing himself deeper
into the rift he cannot see.
She waits,
stroking baby fine fuzz
on her akimbo thigh—each hair
a quick-dry pin-prick of light
in midday heat hot enough
to conjure the arrival of her own sex.