red nails, never fails
to pluck hair from brow and brush aside
the daily do's and don't's, the stray hairs and fears smudging her rosy glasses.
tall boots, grown-up girl suits parade her down the aisle
of the supermarket, purse balancing canned mangoes and fat-free soup.
she's an now girl, a strong-jawed orphan saving apartment buying
woman.

we live by a system of equations,
where
x plus y equals z, a zygote, baby boy.
and x plus x is also a zygote, a girl, indistinguishable from her brother
thus by these rules we simply must assume that x and y are equals.
for who are we to say that a does not equal a, that fifty does not equal fifty,
but rather, something less-than?
it's a system of equality, just as
it
should
be.
who are we to change this? who are we
to take that single cell of potential
and diminish it to something less-than
and who are we to judge a girl before she's born?
look at the sister, the brother, both beautiful in make and model
and dare to raise them as equals.

this is a portrait of a painter painting  a duck,
and as an honest man, i must disclaim
i am no painter, no wordsmith, not even a back-alley beautician
or smoker drawing letters in the air.
i'm a man, a not short nor tall nor distinctive in any other way
utterly invisible. however, as an honest man, i need to say
you are the sole, indescribable, incredible wonder of this park.


you're tall, i think, slim like the long-stemmed brushes you balance between your fingers,
and i think i hear you sing
as you paint that duck, that undistinctive, ordinary,
incredibly lucky duck.
i don't think it knows how lucky it is to have your gaze,
to be captured, immortalized, in your clever fingers.
it quacks off-beat and without thought, and i think,
"for shame, duck, bad on you"
because even someone as naturally invisible as me
knows when to appreciate a spotlight.

the ad on my kitchen table asks,
would you consider donating to
dolphin causes? orphan briefcases? factories for bread and water and those
miracle pills that cure a country in just 3 small,
prescribed,
doses?

would you change a child's life for only $35 a month?
begs the ad rolling in with the mail.
his name is roberto, five foot four, a good kid
who likes baseball and summer days.

a doller a day: a woman begs from channel 6,
donate to the children's hospital of saint something-or-other
have a heart, she says, and help the baby who has a defective one.

a doller a day, or if you're feeling generous,
round up to 5 cents an hour.
how else will you get rid of your rich world guilt?

margaret and I can walk on top of the snow today,
and this is why: after days of
freezing and thawing, melting and wringing and drying stiff and small
a thick 18 inches, we had in january
now just a dry february husk.

margaret and I can skim over the top of this husk:
we pretend to be dexterious; the rule of the game is
you break, you lose
I never lose, and margaret neither, though she tries
to hammer and pound the snow with her tiny ballet feet
I cry out to stop
but she does not stop until the husk, the rind of ice
has broken her.

I cherrypick over days that I don't understand and
when I walk into class an hour past nobody asks why
because the truth is we could all have *** up our sleeves in the time that it takes
for a drug-sniffing teacher to say "marijuana"
but today I wasn't crushing a blunt in the handicap lot
No,
last night my alarm clock died in its sleep
bless its life
and bless my rest, sometimes
I can let life do the cherrypicking for me.

we need to stop cutting for the sake of cutting
and remember how beautiful
memory loss is.