Someone’s at the Laundromat
with a few bolts of currency jingling in their pocket
and a bright red shopping cart
made of holes and heavy plastic.
An empty machine running on suds
churns the lottery squeaky clean.
The price of wishes
faithed in the Lucky Charms of Loose Change,
is printed on leftover tags on old clothes
on sloped shoulders that have
just enough gumption to
fling coins
into the
wishing well.

with all this chuggin' ***** on a caboose,
i'm gonna trip
the alarm system, get in trouble
for my accident, become a siren
and get wrong, rubberneckin' attention.

Prayer’s too hard of a simple machine,

A pulley of light years’ length

Wheeled by the world

I want to hook, like I can’t see the moon

For the man on it.

Please come over. I’ll have a tea set, my clavinova dusted off, Apples to Apples, Bananagrams and a fireplace for philosophical talk. You can keep telling me how the regions of the body have different tones and pitch different notes, and how the ridges of your bones show like ripples in a desert. I’ll wallow in your catalogues: all the warcraft of WWII, the chemicals that preserved the cats we dissected, and the steps to dissolving the puzzle of calculus. You will master the Rubik’s cube over and over again just to amuse me. And deep inside, I hope your poetry isn’t as good as mine. But I’ll still dance better and I’ll still cuddle with you in our home theatre, and I’ll pay you a piece of my mind once I’ve made it up.

We crossed paths after a few snowstorms
And my nerves screeched at the edge of a cliff.
I tugged at my turtle-head hood in an attempt to look good
And a whir of frosted air caked my burning ears.
We exchanged overlapping synonymous greetings,
Your spontaneous recognition and caught-up voice like needlepoint
Left a juicy blackberry stain on my tongue, and I keep licking its
Mystery bittersweet flavor. You fine-tuned your silvery signal
To target the seeds of my darkened pulps
And conduct a lightning strike.
***** minds think alike.

i touch my finger to my lips,
the cue for Nonnie and me to bow our heads, close our eyes, and hush,
our secret to polished silver and earl grey.
Bless our family, and the needy,
and all the other sheep i count
in grandfather clock rhythm.
Milanos water my mouth from their poise-in crepe cups as
my eyelashes, in squint-scope, filter
antique sunshine flooding the window, pouring all over the tea set,
dusting Nonnie's prayer
to flush the face powder
on her cheeks, once she opens her eyes and smiles,
into a blush.