Tag Archives: poem

Unnatural – Poem

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Unnatural

You say I should get out more, that I
should admire nature, that I should swim
in its decorous wisdom. You say humanity

is the stupidest of creatures, and must repair
this umbilical snip from its own creation.
But what am I to admire? Surely not

the sun, rising and setting its work
each day without question, until it buries
itself against its own darkness. Not

the blinking packs of birds blotting
the sky each simple year, or the hurricane
which gripped an entire city with its bluster,

then wandered off and squandered its power
over an empty stretch of marsh. Not
my dog, who’ll do anything for food,

or my cat and her haughty obsessions,
or the silver maple in my backyard
which has yet to figure out it’s January.

The queen’s wreath in the garden
is greedy, it does not know when to stop,
and the passion vine is vulgar, whores all summer

to the bees that die knowingly in its folds.
And what about the fish you caught last season,
with a rusty hook already lodged

in his opalescent jaw? You freed it from your line
then threw it back, and it glimmered away,
ignorant of its own recurrent escape.

Debris Field – Poem.

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Debris Field

This is how we conquer
the mountain, bottle
by bottle, leaving a trail

of leftovers, transforming
our glory into another little shitpile,
a littered barometer of hubris.

Leaving even our bodies
behind, stiff as frozen dinners, foiled
by the basest of elements:

moisture in the air, a monsoon
wind, a thunder of shifting snow.

Maybe the Goddess will wake

and birth an avalanche
from her forehead, wipe away
our little cluster of culprits,

or perhaps the crevasse
will grind us with its icy
teeth, sift the bone-ash back

to a lower glacier – where a team
of Nepalese environmentalists
can collect it with the rest

of what the mountain rejected –

transparent water bottles, prayer
flags that never reached
the peak, the shreds

of winded tents, oxygen tanks
in jellybean colors collecting
on the mountainside

like confections on a theater floor
after midnight’s show.

I originally read the term “debris field” in relation to space waste – human junk orbiting the earth such as satellites and spent rocket stages. But when I tried to write a poem about it, this is what came out instead.

Tropical Depression – Poem

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Tropical Depression

Unlike other storms, Alicia
never wavered, never eyed

another destination, her satellite coil
of clouds blotting out

the TV radar screen, tracking westward
along the coast

towards the island
of our salvation. Headlights guided

a tourists’ line of retreat
on Seawall Boulevard,

windshield wipers clicked off
a steady stream of missed opportunities.

The scent of coconut oiled the air
inside our car, milky and nostalgic, the linger

of a summer already ended,
and all our little failures

swept across the glass
and puddled in the flooding street.

City Girl – Poem

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City Girl

Red wasps have taken over, swarming out
from nests tucked beneath the awnings
of the porch. He tells me not to worry,
that we can learn to coexist, that only fear
of each other brings us harm. Yesterday
I took the boat out, felt the current steal
strength from my hands, watched the yellow oar
sink into mud. Instead of rowing, I gave in
to the drift towards shore. Morning comes,
he takes his gun, heads out to conquer,
while I trace gravel roads past
the pasture fence, rough beams of wood
tied tight with twine and rusted nails. Every day
I climb this path of hills, as if rising
to some conclusion, some vital thing,
while his shots slam out like proclamations
against silence. This morning, a wasp flew out
from a corner of the kitchen, hovered over me
like doubt, like thoughts gone awry,
like some vital thing. I left my coffee,
half-sweetened, on the breakfast table as I ran.

Damage – Poem

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Damage

One summer I walked with a limp
because I wanted to be a cripple,
wanted a flaw to mar the appearance
of perfection we created on vacation,
charging from diversion
to diversion. All I saw
were the backs of their heads,
my mother and her frosted hair,
my father’s white socks
and the tubby ass of my sister
in her terrycloth rainbow romper
always smelling of crotch and hairspray
when she tossed it off at night
into a corner of the Hotel 6
where the silence followed us to Florida
from our home, the home
we never left behind, the home
that trailed us through Adventure Island
and the Congo River Ride.
That was the summer I wished
for cancer, for a tumor that couldn’t be
removed, a mass so thick and palpable
the damage could not be denied, forcing
an amputation, its replacement so false
and hollow my faulty body would thunder
through botanical garden trails, and shatter
the leafy chatter of our family’s last resort.

Baggage – Poem

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Baggage

I have written a thousand poems
to the emptinesses I’ve left

behind, simple as sockrolls
tucked in haversack flap pockets, compact

as a roll of quarters tumbling
in an unfilled suitcase. I would no more

read them to you than I would answer
the ads on back pages of

the foreign city hotel foyer newspapers I read
alone in pallid, impersonal rooms.

Several Ways of Seeing Gender – New Poem

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A work in progress. Feel free to make suggestions (it’s clear to me; not sure it is to anyone else). As always, this post could self-destruct at any time if the poet suffers a severe self-doubt meltdown.

Several Ways of Seeing Gender

1.
A bra strap
misaligned
with the shoulders
of her sundress, the band
black & frayed.

Strained as a noose
fastened to steel girders
on a bridge. In the pew
behind her he thinks
this is the best
she could do?

2.
Oh what he
could do with the dress

freshly pressed
the stockings & shoes
the stance the sass
in the step well-practiced
and kept
in the closet.

3.
He
does not want
to be she

although it would be
easier, although
the H, glottal
fricative
of escape, indicates
dependency
on context, on
environment

& while the sh
of her gender
is also
voiceless, it requires

tension, hints
at secret or shame.
But also

softness. Like silk
slipped past the cleft
of an open drawer.

It’s only
a dress. It’s only
a letter. Cosmetic.
This isn’t hard
to understand.

4.
My son is home from school
& I have to play
by the rules, my fingertips
dry & stubby as the butt
of an old cigar, the red tips
hidden & stored like the bodies
of beetles on display. Clicky
as summer cicadas.

5.
The feminine
for now
only comes out
in pictures, too glamorous
anyway
for church
on Sunday.

It isn’t just gender
that gets in the way,
it’s preference. Taste.

Anyone
who desires elegance nowadays
laments.

6.
I am
this dress
& those
shoes

that pose
in that photo
the lighting
just so
the drape & slit
of skirt against thigh –

she says it isn’t fair
when a man
has better legs
than a woman

7.
& oh what he
could do if he
were she. He does not want
to be she

but he would do
the best she/he could do
if he could wear that dress
to church one Sunday.

Essence – Poem

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Essence

When she brought home little samples
of cologne, wisps of scent
in slender tubes, he tested them
brutally, slapping the wet notes
against his neck like any novice
applies perfume, without respect
for the delicate molecules,
rubbing his wrists together
as if trying to start a fire
with his skin, or worse,
spraying the air
in front of him before walking through
it like a curtain, as if stage-
frightened by that most sensual
of senses, that reminder
of his mother’s lipstick
or an earthy garden
moistened by rain. Once
they were all drained,
he resurrected an old vial
from a cabinet beneath
the bathroom sink, the bottle-dust
thick as velvet against his fingers,
its fragrance potent
with time, its smell
in the soft slope of his neck
like a hallway in a high school
building long condemned, or sex
in a car.

Like California – Poem

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The Ning community This Life Lived is dedicated through weekly practice assignments to heightening awareness and attention. In searching for poems to fit both This Life Lived and mareymercy’s current topic of attention, I came across this one from my manuscript:

Like California

According to reports, vast areas of the Golden State
are sinking, grating against another age, worrying a world
already weary with fault and fracture.

Once on a day’s hike off Skyline Boulevard I felt it
happening, when I ventured past the designated trail
onto unprotected acres, and a snake confronted me

from a deep ridge in the high weeds, rattling
like a rusty cog choking into motion. For a moment
I was so still I disappeared, willed into nonexistence.

It was not unpleasant, or unfamiliar, as if our meeting
were prearranged, its conclusion already known,
and although I believed I would be set free, something within

began unsettling, as if parts of me would never reappear,
small certainties returned to earth like scattered stones –
just like California, shifting back into the sea, one

sacrifice at a time, each release a small restructuring,
simple as a shell’s ear, dissolving into all our fatal histories,
our gentle rumbling towards destruction.

-originally published in Albatross Magazine