New Year’s Celebration

Among mad men in drowning corridors,
built on rusty foundations,
tethered to rotting, sugar-coated
grins, and nestled in the trashcan
of our neighbor’s backyard –
a candle we cannot see burns
out over the mountains, the
ones draped in vacation photographs,
the same set your kitten is named after,
a geological setting, a historical
lesson, a discipline of chances
strewn into another’s handshake
sweat left on the public
bathroom door handle, a smudge
of lipstick left on the countertop,
next to powder – a scene
unimagined for nonexistent detectives.
In a drunken state, we decide to play
Gunshots or Fireworks?
And we laugh when we are wrong.

come here
limbs laced in cotton sheets
my bottom lip between your teeth
tell me the blood drawn tastes like cherries
when we both know it's made of tar
trace a world map on my hipbones in bruises
mark the capital cities with your fingernails
millimeters deep into flesh
let your breath on my neck tell me stories
about who you are and where you've been
your mind spilling ink on pillow cases and skin
and with the left side of this mattress weighed down
let me pretend your hollowed bones
are more than a momentary home

You do not do, you do not do  
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot  
For thirty years, poor and white,  
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to **** you.  
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,  
Ghastly statue with one gray toe  
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic  
Where it pours bean green over blue  
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.  
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town  
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.  
My ****** friend

Says there are a dozen or two.  
So I never could tell where you  
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.  
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.  
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.  
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna  
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck  
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.  
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a *******
So black no sky could squeak through.  
Every woman adores a Fascist,  
The boot in the face, the brute  
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,  
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot  
But no less a devil for that, no not  
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.  
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,  
And they stuck me together with glue.  
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the *****.  
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,  
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you  
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart  
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.  
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you *******, I’m through.

Published in The Quill on November 19, 2014:

http://www.amazon.com/Quill-Fall-2014-ebook/dp/B00PNVT6PG
...

To my Mother – 5643 days after your death

I still count the days, the amount of candles we burned, our unmade faces and her foamy latte – the kind with a drawn on design for no particular reason (other than to brag.)
I don’t worry about the perfume – the smell I do not remember – but I do open the windows, every. other. day.
The sunlight doesn’t burn anymore. My eyes still close. The moonlight blurs after hours of consciousness, and her dog’s birthday comes and comes and never stops but will. One day. Mine will never. Not at this rate. Although the calendar flips faster than I didn’t want it to, even though I did.

Published in The Quill on November 19, 2014:

http://www.amazon.com/Quill-Fall-2014-ebook/dp/B00PNVT6PG

...

On being overweight (whatever that means)

Even if you were the moon, they would complain about how much space you took up in the sky, how you were too bright, wanted too much from the stars, demanded more light than the others.

And when you shifted, from waning to full to waxing to waning, they would remind you of how instable you were, how much of a hassle it was to keep track of your instability, your need for attention. Have you tried to be a vegan yet? All the stars are doing it.

You have tried. In fact, last week was your third try – an attempt, they call it – not enough, they emphasize, try again, they say this as if it is encouragement.

That’s when you found them - the celestial crescent, the earthshine, the perilune, how the lacus are lakes without lakes, why the Gibbous is brighter either way, especially during conjunction – all strung together in pearls.  

You are a full the night you return.

As you reflect off the lake, you see Selene, Hecate, Mani, Tsukuyomi, Iah, and Thoth. You tell the stars to look, to breathe your reflection, to succumb to the glow and the beauty of it all, that you are not alone—

They laugh.

Say how historical that is, how out-of-touch you are, how myths aren’t mirrors, how you -  you are not a mystery at all.

But when you died – if you died – (we still do not know) - they do not wonder where you went. They spin, spin, spin the entire night home, only once confessing to how empty the sky is without your shine.

But every night they burn.

I want to softly whisper
incomplete poems
on your collar bones
that don't rhyme with anything
but your heavy breathing.

I want to bury my face
in the curves of your neck
because you smell like the winter clouds
and I've been gazing at the sky
since you left.

scientists say that a fingerprint develops when a baby is only 12 to 19 weeks along and that it is impossible for two people to develop the same print and although i believe in science i am still hoping there is a chance that someone in the world might have the same etches on the tip of his fingers as you did because to find the same hair colour and the same eye colour and the same smile is almost too easy but your touch against my skin made even the brightest of fireworks envious and darling something like that is irreplaceable