Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

  is patience, an arithmetic of cat and mouse.

  Don’t become disappointed: this thrill is

  evergreen. Soon, you will be held captive, knock-kneed

  with wanting. With enough practice, your mouth will fill

  with the taste of almonds and milk, your breath will honey

  with the rhapsody of absence.

  You are strong enough to survive on vapor,

  yet you feel a fresh collision beginning

  within. When you find him, lost and gasping

  in the coatracks, draw him in with your nectar.

  You are still soft and ripe, a peach.

  An Obligated Woman

  I stagger around you in this empty room,

  a breathy vortex of wanting, incapable of

  naming this grief shifting inside me, smooth

  and heavy like a stone inside a pocket.

  The old bat is clanging in the belfry, unable

  to see the humane through my own dark lens.

  I would sink into your body if it could

  provide me any consolation:

  I would eat you alive at the crossroads if I thought

  the taste would help me swallow this sorrow.

  Post-Post Modernism

  I’m trying to call you but you won’t pick up.

  The 911 operator told me it wasn’t an emergency,

  wouldn’t be for at least three more days. Then maybe,

  I could try filing a Missing Persons report, but what’s

  the point when no one misses you except for me?

  I threw out the hair dryer in protest. I filled the bathtub

  with seltzer. Maybe I can lead you to carbonated water,

  but believe me, I know I can’t make you drink. I’ll rise to

  this challenge. I’ll wait here ’til my eyelashes fall out, if

  that’s what it takes. Was my morning breath really that bad?

  I’m sorry I didn’t wear that fancy bra. The underwire stuck

  into my ribs, and it made me feel like Jesus’ slutty little sister.

  You know I already have a martyr complex. Did you really

  want to feed into that? I’ll put it back on if it makes you happy,

  you know, but I’ll have to call you Judas if that’s the case.

  I eat spicy things just to feel now. I’m so lonely I put on

  the kettle just to have someone to talk to. Even the cat thinks

  I’m eccentric. Won’t you just come back? The internet is a cold

  and lonely place where everyone is wrong, always, and besides, can’t you

  hear the siren call of my knee socks? I am wearing them just for you.

  Echoes

  I fall into you like skinned knees:

  sticky meat, red oozing to surface,

  your mouth like cold air on a wound.

  Blow on it. Anyone who’s telling you

  they don’t like the twinge is lying to

  you. We all want that tingle from pain,

  then the heady release of analgesic,

  how we edge close to oblivion with

  pain’s fading. If you’re truly lucky,

  old wounds don’t heal right, and you

  feel their echoes with the right amount

  of pressure; barometric changing.

  I press against you at different angles,

  seeking out the sweet spot. It occurs

  to me in the midst of this hungry

  coupling that you are unaware that

  this is what I am doing.

  John Glowney

  The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds

  It’s not that they are on their way to anywhere,

  although standing at a bus stop might at first

  make you believe as they do that they are

  more than ready to be somewhere else.

  It’s a late spring day in Seattle, a little rain

  on the discolored facade of the courthouse,

  and on this dampened, cracked sidewalk,

  as if set aside for another time, they wait:

  a slender black woman, her gold-painted fingernails

  glorious coins, arguing with an afro-headed man,

  who flashes the white blossom of a wandering eye;

  a heavy silver-haired eastern European

  grandmother, the spike of a cigarette jabbed

  upwards from her mouth; a clump

  of over-sized jackets and baggy pants

  that are three swaggering young Latino boys

  next to a tall stem of a young girl

  shivering in a mini-skirt, pierced eyebrow

  and lip, and an ex-hippie

  turned public defender, his ponytail

  fraying long gray hairs. In a moment or two

  the sun will break through the low clouds

  as if to examine all ordinary things, and everyone

  will turn and squint, their faces lit

  with expectation, as if they never intended

  to be so plain, as if this was a chance

  for them to shine beyond themselves,

  and they can’t hide their secret beauty

  any more than a flowerpot

  can hold back unfurling

  its little bundle of petals.

  A Change In Circumstance

  A small good deed, I thought, to haul away

  the creepers and weeds my wife had, on a Saturday

  spring afternoon until sunlight ran out,

  cleared and plucked from the flower beds

  into an unsightly pile. I scooped bunches

  of dirt-besotted stalks and leaves into a bucket,

  and heard from its depths then, as if just behind my ear,

  the muted persistence of a bee’s stalled flight.

  My efforts had also disturbed long, fat

  earthworms from, I imagined, a pleasant

  slumber, or more likely, from their steady

  oeuvre of eating the world around them.

  They stretched like lazy, elongated accordions,

  and tunneled in. But the bee, lured in by the yellow

  glimmer of an uprooted dandelion, trapped lover

  of unframed air and pollen’s narcotic pull,

  lover of light’s many doors to elsewhere,

  is now done in, denied exit. Caught off-guard

  by his burial afloat, he buzzes angrily.

  His little motor grinds against a root-clouded

  medium, no glare of petals to steer passage out of

  his clabbered milieu. His circumstance utterly transformed

  at the hand of an unwitting giant,

  his beautifully engineered form rendered

  incompetent, his whirring gossamer wings

  beat furiously into the tangled atmosphere,

  row him against the fouled heavens,

  carry him nowhere.

  From the Book of Common Office Prayers

  Let’s go where moths go for a smoke break,

             or take a mental health day

  with the accountants on pilgrimage

             among the stub ends of pencils.

  Let’s schedule a vacation at the monastery

             of unpaid invoices,

  or take a long lunch sipping martinis

             with penguins

  singing medieval drinking songs.

             Let’s lie down

  in the quiet room so we can hear

             a golden pheasant

  slipping through a white picket fence

             into green thickets.

  Let’s use up our sick leave

             among the last wisps of breezes,

  or take some personal time

             in pollen’s sideways drift.

  Let’s take a sabbatical and travel a year

             with
the sawdust,

  or find a cheap apartment in the neighborhood

             of the moment

  the birds startle into silence

             and work

  on our novel. Let’s take a cruise

             on the good ship

  Two Week’s Notice.

             Dear god, let’s quit.

  Learning A Trade

  Taught the mercy of butchering

  the lame cow,

  schooled that what is not useful

  is waste,

  we wised up, staggered

  out of bed,

  began earlier,

  rubbing the dark

  from our eyes. We worked

  sun down to chaff,

  shavings, stalks

  discarded, stub-ends, the peelings

  fed to swine, day unbuckled

  from dawn,

  laid all the fields

  open, let in

  as much light as the fences

  would take,

  lugged frayed bundles

  of leaves, scraped

  the branches raw,

  cut the dull plow

  into the stony reservoir

  of topsoil, stored enough

  to starve in the spring.

  We shouldered up

  to the best cows,

  milk flowing

  and pulsing

  into silver cans, slopped

  the dregs, straddled

  drought’s dwindling

  ruts, roads to next

  to nothing, a bog

  of stinking water,

  black sky floating

  to its end, flies

  milling above. The nub

  of not enough

  our rough apprenticeship.

  Zenith

  All this beauty, billboards of women

  fifty feet tall, yards of golden

  flesh-tone paint. I am a prisoner of my lips

  and eyes and hands and skin I said.

  At the studio, they cut the lights,

  gave me a shirt without buttons,

  a robe without a belt.

  I am lifted upon scaffolding, unfurled.

  I am battered and shiny as tin.

  Your ink stains my flesh.

  My hair is not brushed for me.

  How do I feel without clothes I ask.

  Pandemonium of rush hour.

  A thousand infidelities inch past.

  The silk air.

  All the eyes crawling over me are ants.

  My open mouth, my white teeth.

  The trucks on the road all night

  from Detroit to Tallahassee

  lathe my shape.

  The moan of traffic.

  The coyotes lie with me,

  yellow-eyed, panting.

  The moths that cover me at night,

  stout, hairy bodies pulsing.

  When they are finished with me,

  they lower me like a corpse.

  I suffer all those who come unto me.

  Andrea Jurjevic O’Rourke

  It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective

  Deep enough to step into, touch lapels of his suits,

  patch leather elbows of tweed jackets, ties lurking

  through thin mod prints, hint of naphthalene and musk.

  And Mom’s feather-light blouses—slack polyester willows.

  Rows of empty sleeves faced west, to the window

  that framed the rugged Učka curving above the bay,

  its hazel-green like the eyes of this fox boa that Dad,

  in one of his moments of bravado, had stolen

  for Mom, and that she, of course, never wore. Once,

  those glassy eyes flashed, as if at the dirt-brown stack

  of scuffed briefcases on the ground. Inside, sis and I found,

  lay stained, yet still glossy, catalogs of the ’70s decadence—

  page after frayed page of nudes running through poses.

  Our lashes threshed at each of those glam-wantons—

  and that dog. We’d seen sunbathers scattered across cliffs,

  naked and lazy like fat beige gulls, and that other time

  when we peeked through the keyhole at Dede bending

  over a steaming bath, his body creased with sickness.

  Instead, this show of shipyard makeovers—the hollow O’s

  of pink-frosted lips, lids caked with silver eye-shadow, thick

  semen, and in this up close, Salò-like shot—that puppy’s

  innocent erection, its mahogany fur almost like our pet setter.

  Romani Orchestra

  Even the street kids running by a kavana in this poorly-lit alley know your kind—

     another dull Slavic star among clouds of smoke,

  balanced on the edge of a rickety stool, leaning toward some new, pretty face,

     the two of you cleansed in the reflection of shot glasses.

  From their street, your mouth is a funk apparat of familiar lines: all brass, blather,

     your tar-grained voice plying romance like a fiery Balkan accordion.

  And for a few more dinars between the strings, the violin will keep lamenting,

     trumpets coughing their belligerent longing,

  your blind hand pawing up her warm knee until the lights come on, spill milk over

     your magic squalor, the streets already in their cardboard sleep.

  Time Difference

  Six hours apart is not too bad on an average day.

  Like when you step into jeans, still stiff

  from cleanliness, I slip into the coldness

  of sheets. And in some other world

  somehow more physical than typing notes

  we almost meet in one naked moment,

  though not many days are average just as you

  are not an average man. Except, you remind me

  of someone I knew years ago—at times

  even loathed—he, too, was a picaresque consumed

  with unrestrained sex and the nursing of plants:

  like that ficus with bruised eyes you found

  on a street curb and now tend to with UV lamps,

  (the blooming cactus he filmed daybreak-to-dusk,

  just as Death in Venice observes a man observing a boy).

  Like the sun is busy, dedicated to the fading of drapes,

  and Albuquerque dust turns the sky into sheets of slate—

  how long before the limestone cliffs of the Adriatic?

  Like the ebb of a paper cut, the thrill of your messages,

  thin and anemic as the hours between them.

  Funny, had I loved him less I’d hardly remember him,

  just that skin: ashen, after he died, his gaze fixed

  at the flickering persimmon out the bathroom window,

  leaf shadows on his face, and the fruit of his absent breath—

  More Ferarum

  You make me feel graceful in savagery.

  With every snarl, each small whine, I shiver like a junkie at the sight

     of a burnt teaspoon,

  like fever chills zing through bones, like the warmth of panic attacks.

  You turn me on in uneasy ways, like a fresh widow’s recurred penchant

     for crotchless panties,

  the sweet ache of fucking against the stone sink behind St. Josephs’, chicory

     scratching itself, the bells’ rings like tongues

  gossping. In fact, I think you’re the little beast squatting under my ribs,

     beating on the djembe—at each thump I tremble:

  a smack like the sweet and bitter in Maraschino, a scorpion’s pinch.

  I feed you nest-tangles of my hair, the skin off the small of my back, toss

     in a few fine words—Spank my ass with that plank-hard cock—

  so we will never get bogged down with some
ordinary anxieties, love,

     just like the sea will never stop fighting itself.

  Love Boat

  If I talk to it nicely, will it work? he asks

  while scanning my card, feeling the strip

  on its plastic back. I mumble back something

  clumsy. He’s cute, though, gives me long looks—

  I can tell he hasn’t practiced them often.

  His arms, their long mossy smoothness

  shows under the rolled-up plaid shirt, its tail

  tucked loosely below the ribs of his corduroys.

  I think, He is far too young, and how I’ve fallen

  for the bookish types too many times before,

  how my history with such is enough to fill

  the scrawny poetry shelf in the corner,

  the one facing golden puff pastry recipes

  and columns of self-help manuals.

  I think how certain personal histories

  should be pushed overboard some transatlantic ship,

  made illegal, declined visa and residence and sent

  to Cuba, or some other godforsaken place.

  But Cuban music is sensuality and vice fused tight

  (the stuff decisions are usually made of), and I imagine

  Creole nights must have that strange sultry flavor, too.

  I think about how mellow sounds can be cues

  for something more disturbing—like jazz in movies

  signals a brooding scene in a little room in the back,

  someone sitting on a bistro chair under a bare bulb,

  beaten like the orange pulp of six hundred cracked

  mamoncillos. At the same time I fail to understand

  the meaning of an unresponsive bookstore card,

  and why, an hour later, as I stir granules of raw sugar

  into my macchiato, I find that my new notebook