Posts for June 3, 2015

You had a 21 year-old loofa
tucked into the pocket of the hunter green terry cloth robe
I’d used on my way to the bathroom.
The loofa had come as a stunt, you said,
in one of those Sunday edition inserts, way back
when the hunter green of the robe
bespoke middle class propriety
and a soap for all your 2000 parts
made everyone momentarily stop to account for themselves
and come up perpetually,
woefully
short.

You readily admitted
you should probably get a new one, because
diseases, bacteria, yeah
it’s probably (no definitely) disgusting, but the thing was
every time you got a new one —
sometimes fancy ones even — it really didn’t matter
they would always just
break,
disintegrate, go to pieces
so quickly
you’d always end up back
with the same old loofa
you hadn’t even bothered to throw away quite yet, until
it became
the 21 year-old loofa
you refused to get rid of,
that had made you finally just give up worrying
about what anyone said about it, because damned if that loofa
was ever going
to fall
apart.

And as I lie
next to you, thinking
about how you’d said, yeah,
you’d seen this other girl for a minute, yeah
you’d been talking to her, but just– yeah,
I was still the last person you’d been with since the last time,
and how you’d said the same thing the time before that,
and the very same thing the time before that, and
it just
hit me —

Fuck.
No.

I don’t want to be a fucking loofa
in this goddamn terrible metaphor.
I don’t want to think
about this fucking loofa at all.
I don’t want
to tidy this up
into something I can deal with, into something
pathetic and kind
that forgives him,
not anymore
because, 
in my own goddamn poem,
I should always get to be
so
much
more
than some crappy thing
someone just finally stopped wanting to get rid of.

This cold, subdued day:
Is it blackberry winter
Or our world changing?

and no matter how many times I count, there’s still five more to go. Is the nausea really back? The car’s leaking so damn much oil we’re going to have to get it fixed. I think I had too much caffeine today, so why does it feel like I could fall asleep standing over these zucchini? I forgot to take my prenatal vitamin. Why can‘t I breathe through my nose? I still haven’t cleaned the bathroom. “Like carrying a bowling ball between your legs,” I read online, and I guess that’s about right, because surely bowling ball on bone would hurt like this. And I probably jumped up too fast when I saw that kid pushing my son on the playground. How did he get so fast? I can’t keep up when it feels like my left hip is going to come out of its socket. When we get home he yells “Mommy” at least one thousand thirty times, especially when cheeks hit the toilet seat, but at least that time he followed it up with “I love you.” And it’s okay that he got chocolate ice cream on the cable bill. Why is the dog being so needy? It’s forty minutes past his bedtime but he still hasn’t had a bath. I just can’t remember to keep my wrists straight, now my fingers are numb again. I might just lay down for a minute, but the bed’s covered in laundry I haven’t folded yet. There’s five more weeks to go.

Thinking of Abraham

How to Like Yourself

First, the easy part—

hide from mirrors

and never look down.

Avoid your clumsy

body with all its

clicking bones and

sluggish flesh.

When sitting, cross

your legs and arms.

Better yet, lie down

flat and close your eyes.

Cover yourself up

and invite the

darkness.

After that is when

the work  begins.

Try to maneuver

through the angles in

your mangled mind:

Glide past your greed,

your anger and envy;

overthrow your

neuroses and nonsense

interpretations.

Sidestep the stinging

tentacles of

your failures,

the slow stabs

of the bad

things done

to you,

and all

the bad things

you’ve done.

Jeremiah started writing his Lamentations
immediately after he read mine, 

which he hated.

He saw himself as a mirror
of my former lovers, however shadowy or dated, 

somehow they all looked like him.

He saw himself as history, a melancholy footnote,
cast aside into verse. 

So he tossed my rhymes behind him

and went inside like the abating ocean
returning home, 

and no new song could call him back,

nor soft skin the color of moonlight,
so lost in the past he doomed himself to repetition 

and became a reflection.

Nobody reads poetry anymore.
So how magical that while bumper-to-bumper traffic is leaving the city
we visit a neighborhood florist on a balmy afternoon
and walk through the vestibule of greenhouses with their profusion of blooms
to find Kentucky poetry nobility gathered in the garden amid waning white tulips.
The literati sit on benches, rocks, fences in the sweet-smelling air
or stand alongside teenagers and squirrels on the fence who listen
as each poet in alphabetical order steps under the umbrella to read without fanfare.
A clipboard circulates for the open mic, democratizing the evening
presided over by George Ella, our poet laureate, who knows to begin with a funny poem.
Various writers speak in tongues declamatory, political, confessional.
Gurney Norman offers a rhyming poem against mountaintop removal.
Even John Michler, our host, reads a poem of his own, gently, in his Garden of Eden.
No microphone makes us listen more intently to the rich variety of voices
People linger, loathe to leave this lush setting.

Dew
between toes
under heel
wet grass
clinging to skin

Sometimes 
wet feet 
aint so bad

A soft choir of rain
manifests the skye entire.

If you look real hard
you can see the figure

of a man conducting.
His hands in fists

and for a moment
you’d think he was fighting.

on the back porch
of House-Rawlings Funeral Home
smoking Marlboro Lights,
and how he’d buy them for his mom,
and how she’d joke about all those years smoking,
and how, when she finally got cancer,
it was in her pancreas,
but he can’t find a punchline,
just a reason
to laugh.