Category: Words

God bless the pretty girls
in skirt-suits and sneakers
office shoes in plastic bags
swaying up the subway stairs.

I stare; they look away.
I follow them up
outdoors up
through the park up
indoors up
among the flickering cubicles —
We’re all alone on this train.

iii. The Blood Meal
    Up to four males have been found feeding on one female Ixodes holocyclus tick…

Innate imperative:
Seek a host, dig in, and swell,
and wait.
The males, spermatophores with legs,
don’t even feed.

Or shouldn’t.
Their stubby mouthparts useless on a mammal host
They climb aboard their mate’s immobile bulk:
the doomed stealing from the unborn.

iv. Adelphophage
We don’t pick the winners in this game,
just set the level field and watch them run.
Unkind, perhaps, but fair:
You’ll know the strong by how they thrive.

Each womb’s a feeding ground where
sharp-toothed embryos first learn to hunt.
Of eighty fry, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed to bring them up to size.
We know the strong by how they thrive.

Good Enough
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us — Robert Haas

Breaks my heart to see that smile
and know it’s not for me.
I know better than to play at make-believe
but I still miss the fantasy
of being more than good enough.

Every day I march past thick bromeliads in the tower’s lobby:
Deep-green and hothouse-reared,
rubbed twice weekly with Shultz’s Leaf-Shine polish
by a man who spends his breaks napping in the service elevator,
wilting slowly in a sterile breeze.

1. The Epiphyte
Sprouting from the folds
of trunk and branch,
it reaches up to sun and down to soil.
The narrow tendrils twist to gain support.

Once the host is dead, the vines persist upright,
supplant the scaffolding that raised them.

2. The Brood Parasite
Before she killed her stepsisters,
she’d memorized their mother’s plumage
Her brighter mouth the most insistent,
the others starved to weakness,
she pushed them off the ledge.

Laying now herself, she picks the host
who most evokes the nest that she destroyed.

Insomnia
Not yet sunrise, and in an upstairs window
a silhouette puts up her hair, leans forward
to set her breasts in place before an early shift.

I’m crosseyed and lonely and
waiting for sleep wakes mute and stupid hopes
so I just lean against the sill and let the focus fade.
In the upstairs window the light goes out;
When dawn begins, my head is hot against the glass.

Covering
“… worm-farming, that thankless trade no one wrote back about, the quiet work for which you were born.”
— Mary Karr, “Worm-Farmer’s Lament,” The Devil’s Tour

Detached complit types will note the Fritz Lang feel
of grey commuters streaming underground
toward squalling trains and toil;
raise a brow at useless regs
– in case of riot, stay indoors –
resent the dowdy mode of dress.

They know.
But every creature has its shell.

Reviews and resumes elide the truth,
disclose no measure of the heart’s desire.
But grime does not make drudgery
nor practiced weekday face a lie.

Companionate Marriage
“The marital ghetto is the human equivalent of a balanced aquarium, where the fish and the plants manage to live indefinitely off each other’s waste products.”
Michael Vincent Miller, Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion

Romance, that tired old nag, died years ago.
We visit graveside when we can,
bring offerings of flowers, candles, scented oils,
and books on intimate massage
to conjure up its almost-present ghost.

I last felt its unbidden presence this past spring
after the ambulance and before the second surgery,
crouched in a hospital bathroom
holding a screwtop jar for my wife to piss in.

And cleaning off my hands I knew I was in love.
It’s no soft-focus 30-second TV spot,
and “be my symbiont” will never grace a greeting card
but it’s our way, and for ourselves it’s true.

Someone actually did tell me this story about MIT. And Ellen Swallow really was the first woman to attend MIT, starting in 1871.

Lady Chemist, 1873

The barman said the first year with girls at tech was cold
and with everyone wrapped up in down
and the chicks unshaved you could hardly tell.

He’d got the date wrong by a hundred years.

Ellen Swallow, chemist, class of seventy three,
wore a dress and plaited hair to labs and lectures,
cleaned and sewed between;
on graduation served the board of health,
as mistress of untainted water,
preventer of industrial fires.

A century on the dorms were mixed
and we’d forgot how long it took,
how slow a legacy was built, how quickly past.

Well, I moved and then I was offline and then I was busy. But here’s one.

Play your part
“Even the tenderest stalk of flesh grows calloused with work…” – Mary Karr, The Devil’s Tour

We all got one, so don’t go thinking
you’re specially constrained.
Just pull your script and read your lines.
Smart one, pretty one, funny one, sad:
Lead or or not each role begins to chafe.

It’s unfair, I know, poor thing, it’s not what you deserve.
Well, as papa always told you life’s unfair,
what’s more, unfair on your behalf.

So strut and fret your hour, kid,
and then get up and go to work
and do your job and watch the clock
and pay your goddamn bills
and play your goddamn part.

Papers, Please

No es difícil fabricar un certificado que asegure con timbres y estampillas, que se es turco; no es fácil, en cambio, nacer en Turquía. – Manuel Rojas, Hijo de Ladrón

Papers, please. Credentials, sir, and proof of worth.
No exceptions, I’m afraid, and please don’t start
on proof and fact and claim
your mere existence proves itself.

We know, we know, but we do not believe:
the deeply rooted need for certainty
will overcome the truth
and I don’t make the rules,
so show your papers please.