poems on a tuesday

today being one of those days
when you finger the rosary beads and they flick off the string
like height-drunkened baby birds,
shooting accross the kitchen and onto the tiles
with laborious little click, click, clicks

when the edge of your scarf boils with the syrup,
congesting the room with the smell of molten wool

today being one of those days
when, ten years tardy,
the whole world shrivels in your grasp
and weeps

you fold your white hands like a pair
of small linen napkins and stare straight ahead of you
without so much as an "oh."

sacrifice

burning black with blood
the sky looks down on me
and hides his face.

i pile high in the front yard
raw memories, fractured
corpses of relationships

i heap them one on top of another.

smoke soaks the air like a wet sponge,

musky,

thick with the stench of empty gum wrappers
and charred humanity.

i lit that match.

the red sea slaps at my feet,
branding them with blood

she sits in her sadness

and licks the salt from her lips.
clenches her fingers into two tiny fists.

let me never love again,
she howls

and she begs the Lord not to hear.

eighth period physics

the physics classroom is like
a root canal

my brain chokes on mouthfuls of
cotton.

SCALAR: magnitude only
-distance; speed
(directionless)

the minute hand lopes onward with difficulty

we have gambled away our
futures on the clock's slow progress,
a debilitated rabbit.

the back of your head looks
soft, Mr. Crawford,
like something a robin would nest in.
you should have been a Puritan.

today i am as large and looming,
dispatching very quickly to my blurry vision
of nowhere.
the unspecified point in quadrant three, that's me.
perfectly scalar.

almost an island

dank sets into your limbs
like deafness,
sedentary.

your arms lock across your chest,
a boulder, a barricade,
a levy of sandbags against a colony of words.

they forage, they breakfast, they break bread
their children speak Yiddish; smoke curls from their chimneys

mutinous, they befriend the cerebral

and with a quake, your dry lips part.

you are almost an island,
but you are a woman.

conversion

sliced open for the world to see,
the rest of what was hidden lies unlatched.
hatched.

their hooded eyes sever.
no longer mortal

branded now as you are by the star of david

boring holes in your diaphragm,
convoluting your abdomen with its
six severe tips

your fingernails digging little half-moons in your palms,
missing only the star

post-party nonsense

grinning,
your curry-colored curls
standing proud
against the pale of the sky
like something an osprey
would nest in.
you drink in the world
and you choke.
you understand:
"if my sister spends all night
batting eyelashes at
other people's dates,
i think i'm going home."

prayers for today

Lord,
i have a chronic love for your children
and $127 stuffed in an unmarked envelope
behind my dresser.
use me.




Abba,
help me to love him in his lies and in his shame
because he deserves your mercy
more than i do.

children of Abraham [love in the time of war]

we may walk the aisle of a concentration camp
instead of St. Basil’s like we wanted to
but Moscow or Auschwitz doesn’t matter
as long as i spend my life with you.

It may be short, but we will fight:
our fabled blood runs deep.
we’ll hold each other tightly in this
slaughterhouse for sheep.

“may the children of this union
walk out of here alive”:
i’d be content with that, even if
we both have to die.

but either way, they’ll show their face
and find themselves so strong.
they’ll learn to love their “fatal wrong”
they’ll always fear is flawed.

i hope they’ll fight for what they are
and what is right to do,
and they find someone to love them
half as much as i love you.

our wedding bells may mix with rings
of atom bombs and tears
but i would never trade that moment
for a thousand peaceful years.

so rise, you child of Abraham!
lift up your weary head!
for if they kill our bodies,
our spirits live instead.

and when you’re in that chamber filled
with gas like molten jade,
recount that love is tangible;
my love will never fade.

they cannot take what they can’t see:
love can’t be touched or shot.
inside this hell, hear wedding bells
until we meet with God.

symphonic running

the sky, cracked,
split with a hammer
down the middle
like peices of a skull,
bleeding blue blood

the cllllickwhirr whistle of
nearby construction work
sounding eerily celtic

against my heart's cacophonous
thud, thud,

my feet, syncopated,
thunk dejectedly
against the great bubble-gum-tape
ribbon of pavement
like heavy drops of water

landing always, mutinously,
one in front of the other.

press # now for a broken spirit. for an awkward apology, press the * key. to speak with a representative, please hold for several more years.

hint:
you must speak to be heard

some days do you feel like

a blade of grass stretching your
insignificant self towards the
whir of the sky?
past the weak heads of the weeds
and the wilting?
forever pruned by some great celestial
lawnmower?

you cannot seem to grasp that no amount of tap dancing can repair these holes you have hammered into everyone you love

bubbling up like a thick stream of gravel
for the first time,
anger.
my eyes slithering grotesquely into narrowed slits,
for the first time,
anger.
snapping and whimpering in turn, like a wounded animal.
sore.
anger,
a savage fish-hook grabbing blindly at me,
catching in places and ripping out chunks.
you, my foundation,
my concrete, my sidewalk,
point your nose to the clouds like a bayonet with an acid harumph.

sitting cross-legged in that waxy-faced battle stance,
shoulders shallow,
watching with great slivered cat-eyes,
you are like Henry VIII. like Saladin.

i raise round eyes, mottled, dark.
an enemy that loves you might be the most formidable.
my sheep-eyes are soft
(i am a rather formidable enemy.)

your lips curve so sharply
in some sort of satisfaction
that i am made of glass.

your fingers spread wide on the pounce.
with an irrevocable crack,
the inevitable shatter.
when you break me it stabs right back into you.

sore thumbs.
what else have we been taught?

you suckle your fingers, ripe with pieces of
me.
you're blinded by blood that you've smeared on some altar
to something you've deadened
but felt should be strong.

i am whispering something vital
through claw-cracked lips.

listen,
or

you'll be facing an army with nothing to fight with,
and you'll always have broken glass in your thumb.

georgiana

indefatiguable,
you baptized the cat and
used all twenty-seven of my
smartly packaged antiseptic towelettes.

wide-eyed,
your baby brother watched you twirl
archly through mum's violets with a soft fluid
whoosh.

rosy, flushed,
you snapped your femur into
three or four pieces,
a red and white jigsaw puzzle
of mangled warm blood,

your cherub's face cracked and
tarnished with a wail.
the throb of your pulse the small flutter of
a bird's wing under my heavy thumb,

the sky flushing purple like watercolor,
the world all topsy-turvy like when
those fat-free popsicles turned out to have
23 grams of sugar.

sinus infection

leaden,
tilting precariously atop my neck,
like a sleepy glob of clay,
like a balloon inflated with
2,999 bottles of DayQuil.
it lets droop tired eyelids
over tired, defeated eyes.

sulkily, metering palpitations,
the raucous throb of
the 2,999 NyQuil-saturated fishes
swimming mercilessly through my veins.
up, down,

thrusting up goosebumps like
the opposite of bubble wrap.
the head drops-
infected,
sneer the sinuses

sisters in Baltistan

die for the other.
sip that fate calmly between slurps of
acrid tea.
here you peck at it
like a bird full of rice
and spit my nonsense back
in my face.

i love you because

of your heart's fine white stitching,
vivacity foaming up behind
satin-sheen eyes

of your voice,
like the soft slippered footfall of steps on stairs

like falling face-first into a mattress

of the smudge here, this branding,
the sunburn of loving:

crisped like a well-done pastry,
sprawling feet-first toward the sun.

you are such a glorious enigma that you choke the singer and stump the poet

you are paper-thin lightning
a sweet liquid baritone

the fluid pinging of a harp.

you are the sweet-smelling juice dribbling
down children's chins from the pulp of a skinned

peach.

you are as fragile as a marizipan Eros
whose warmth i cradle in the curve of my spine

the great Greek confection staring
with affably lung-numbing eyes from the backs
of my eyelids.

your armor is clean and undented.

no, no, no, no
you can't handle me.

walking with that naturally vigorous semitic subtlety accross an eastern-european parking lot, eyes locked, the grey-faced lady giving birth

right there on the pavement,

rrrrip, riiip, rippp,

bloody wailing from identical lungs.

one sweat-stained forehead becoming

two.