THE FLESHINESS
If there’s a moon,
Be over it!
If there’s an inchworm,
Get all fours!
If it’s my funeral,
We’re making out!
That’s the fleshiness,
Them’s the rules!
JOY CARTEL
On the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time—
who knows the day or the hour—
you stand by my cries with a mop.
Where you’re from, it’s different;
but where I’m from, it’s simple:
you just gotta let me turn blue.
Under the bull’s constellation,
you hold my misery down
for so-called questioning.
You say you hear me, loud and clear,
but I hear you telling me
to aim my vomit at the bag.
As the calendar drags on,
into the month of the knife,
you come running with a band‑aid.
So I write you this letter—
to tell you about lessons: that
I’ll be learning them the hard way.
POTLATCH OF DESTRUCTION
Ye who dwell off planet, ye on screen,
Fallen out of love with wool and cumin,
Who strive not to shake the Nazarene mudra,
Who won’t set foot in Youngstown, Ohio,
Not reading wide-eyed the popcorn ceiling
Nor the thundercloud slowly coming,
Loyal only sparingly to the big love itself,
Requiring rather it be named and hefty,
You who put the angels in quotations,
And reject the treeplanter of legend,
Explain to me the urgency that bids us blush.
Say the name of the world that makes us,
Pisses on rooftops, watching up high.
Tell me with a straight face you stand dry,
In a cornflower blue dress and not a riddle,
Lie and say you didn’t feel the wind tickle.
Give me your facsimile, hollow gum marks,
Toothless, touchable way your universe starts,
Without mentioning the quipu of melancholy
Whose stations we thumb hubristically.
Straight face me nitrogen cycle as fact,
Not as miracle but merely accidental,
Devoid of harpoons, graffiti, and clamor,
Not accumulating in the shape of Himalayas.
But when the unsnoozable trumpet blasts;
When the unprotected pot of nectar bursts;
When the verdant bird returns with his broom,
You too will be washed in saved-up perfumes
And be asked to swing a sledge at the stone
Where once we haggled over the clock.
BATHROOM, AS SEASIDE
The bathroom has shells, pale blue walls,
a nod to the ocean’s cleanliness, saying
welcome: encounter water here.
Never mind that the ocean is filthy,
that the bleach we flush for three basins
strangles all manner of aquatic relatives.
I would like a new take on the trope:
stack the toilet in the bathtub, then
nest the sink inside the toilet like dolls.
Efficiency meets beach-lounge geometry.
Or hang a living eel instead of a hand towel,
train it to lick our rinsed hands dry.
I imagine an eel has a sandpapery tongue—
though I’m not sure it has a tongue at all—
to welcome you into this room for shitting.
ELEVEN SONGS
[Anthropological notes appended in italics.]
1.
Neil Young sings
Time Fades Away
On the beach
Tonight is the night
[The first lines reference a song by Neil Young, a noted American songwriter and performer. Songs commonly reference other songs, but usually the reference is implicit.]
2.
I’d call but I have nothing
to say
I’ve been here not thinking a
bout you
I’d call but I have nothing
to say
[No data.]
3.
Here’s your bitter medicine
I brought it from the woods
On my tongue
[A song traditionally performed acapella, sometimes backed by the crackling of a leaf.]
4.
Shaving with a knife
Eases the job
You can use it also
As the mirror
[Certain songs accompany highly specific activities, such as shopping the produce section, attending the wedding of a distant relation, or in this case, grooming.]
5.
What jokes did I tell?
Your cousin
She chuckled five times
[Family reunions once played a major role in American culture.]
6.
I’m leaving Pittsburgh
In a car
Because walking’s too slow
[The American football team with the most geographically dispersed following is the Pittsburgh Steelers, due to substantial outmigration.]
7.
Crushing a bad bug in my fingers
Is it not
A sentient being?
[The influences of Buddhism on Western American culture were strongest in the San Francisco area, Boulder, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. Chinatowns, war service in the Pacific rim, and Beat poetry also played notable roles in the expansion of such concepts.]
8.
Thinking of you
When the plug dangles
Where I sit outside the bar
Maybe I’ll find an outlet
And stick it in
[A wide variety of drinking songs are recorded. Common themes include love, loss of love, loss of other kinds, and drinking itself. In this case, the song refers to friends in other zip codes.]
9.
In this narrow of the canyon
The snake sheds his skin
Like a blue prairie onion.
[Later, an idiom would develop that describes hope as a “light at the end of the tunnel.”]
10.
Are those bouncing braids
Or a buffalo from behind?
[Some subcultures conflate lust with the hunt.]
11.
At the Goodwill
Not shopping
Dropping off
A box of kitchenware
I say God bless you
Take care
[You never know what’s going on in someone else’s life.]
DRYLAND LENTIL
Never mind the scarecrow you keep in your chest—
I land on your finger and flutter, red-breasted,
Learning to sing of the weather you wear
Then sleep on the floor, straw tangled in air.
Be damned the speed trap just past your curves
I know the sweet talk the lawman loves to hear.
If they take my license, I’ll saddle a horse,
Ride in late, smelling of manure and desire.
Look past the rainless acres of your eyes—
I’m a dryland lentil, stubborn to rise,
Poking through the ground of sunburnt years
To fill your pockets in times of harvest.
Forget the yellowed library of caution
That papers the walls of your noggin;
Life is a one-room schoolhouse, we learn,
Where we trade the chalk as teacher in turn.
And when one day this marble game ends,
Colliding we roll off and don’t meet again.
You’ll find me in the creekside pebbles,
Vivid while wet, white pale when dried.
NEGOTIATION
God gazes toward me from between your legs.
You proceed blissfully unaware that your pants
prevent me from making eye contact with the Almighty.
Perhaps if I shared His whereabouts with you
your demeanor would change and with a snap
of a button I would negotiate directly with the Boss.
GRIOT
To cut the sky open with a razor
And spill the secrets it bottles up
about the future, as from the
Taut stomach of a young goat,
From whence the birds tumble
Into their respective nests.
IS THIS POEM ABOUT THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS?
True we killed your boys
Raised the flag on ‘em
The whole 9 yards of ‘em.
Don’t be surprised at us
Hiding in the Alleghenies
While your tongue takes.
We already ate the stars
Our boys wear 32 shirts
We got ‘em furled up on us.
POLISH FALCONS NEST #8
Southside cop horn—divine favor to solicit,
beg bypass the clamor of voices in the street.
Old blood paces not, sits heavy on lintels,
nods only to bishops, nods off in the cold.
Plastic siding, onions, disco ball abiding,
hot casserole hiding, policeman deciding.
Roman numeral strides, Polish falcon flashes,
diagnostic waited for—many minutes to live.
TEACHER
You play your synthesizer by the elementary.
The kids sing to it, “tag you’re it, ha!”
You teach them to throw the parked cars against the clouds
And give each other neck tattoos with their lips;
To honor the doctors and the ironworkers
On level footing with the Carpenter;
To grab the sun with their eyes and bounce it;
How to grab the slice of mountain visible between buildings
And stretch it across the whole frame tightly.
ONE DAY AT A TIME
In the month the Bluetooth speaker
lived on a single charge,
I walked the long, long walking
it takes to cross a gate’s width.
From gibbous moon to gibbous,
I lodged in a P.O. Box—painstakingly—
abandoning loved ones,
soaping myself assiduously.
ON TASTE
In earning a living
by working for the king,
I’ve learned he hates jazz.
He swears he loves it—
claims to adore fine wines—
but what he loves
is extolling the score,
counting the corks,
weighing their worth.
His taste for statistics
knows no worms,
makes no room for holes,
hears no hymn in the hollow bottle,
its insides spent on revelry;
he won’t swallow an old roof tile
that’s traded its usefulness
for life again as clay.
He does not sense
that he’s smaller
than a clarinet’s key—
each one rippling endlessly,
reveling in the men who are worms,
who wriggle into hollow places
at night—and honk,
low and long, in hollow places
for the living.
TO THE WOMAN WITH FOUR NAMES I OFFER A FIFTH
“Five?” she says—that first Maria is no name,
but a proprietary invisibility,
invented either in Magdalene or Bethany.
And anyway, what you call your last
is just the sound of an adze on pine,
carving the quiet.
Skookum Atlas 