Went to a drag show
(Fabulous)
To support a former student
And everyone was so shocked
“Oh my gosh! Thank you for supporting her!”
I shouldn’t have to be thanked
I should be as I am
Joyous at their success and beauty
But as I left a drag queen danced me to the curb
And we screamed “Happy Pride!”
And several voices lifted to scream
“Yas queen! Happy Pride!” Back
And i felt better
To be common and in collection
With joyous others
Black people own slaves too and
I’m going to buy you your freedom.
Because your exploiters don’t know
the meaning of a 5 day work week,
an eight hour work day,
payment for missed meals,
breaks and overtime pay.
These are not only union rules.
these are human rights.
You deserve bonuses, employer
401K contributions and travel pay.
Once they have worked your body old.
It will be me that keeps you afloat.
I write this for both of us.
You deserve better, much more and
the ability to live comfortable in old age.
But don’t you frett we are moving on.
You laugh, but I have never been more serious.
You’re smart, talented, kind and considerate.
Believe me, we both deserve a bigger life.
If I can see it; you definitely can dream it.
The book was burning
from fire to fire
We thought her words were safe inside the book
The many pages with
black serifed text
a finer than most
hard cover front and back
The children ran down the halls of the burning house
grabbing things as they fled
a framed picture, a favorite shirt,
medicine bottles, old letters, a radio,
but the books, the Books
were on fire already—-crackling
the sound of paper screaming
And all of the books hovering close
on the shelves didn’t save them
Eyes square on them one last look
the sight of her book in a flash gone
the last thing to carry out
in disbelief
Of you saying this is nothing to be upset about
Of this job that runs me ragged
Of feeling like this for no reason
Of hurting people
Of breathing too heavy
Of not breathing enough
Of making myself be better
Of questioning why I’m like this
Of working hard or hardly working
Of sleeping in too late
Of being too trusting and surprised when I’m betrayed
Of failure
And of falling
corpse aquittal
How the woods burn
this afternoon, but not
so brightly as they did
when we were children.
Pan with his titian hair
cherry cheeks & those
crescents—not yet horns—
just barely bursting from head.
How he loved the scarce
swallowtail & plain tiger
landing in shades of saffron
& coral on his tad fingers.
Now we have all grown.
Forest smolders grape & green,
simmers copper & bronze
with morel & porcini.
Sky still hovers but drapes
itself in cornflower, not
cobalt, sun no longer blasts
but sneaks between pine & poplar.
What have we to hold onto
that will not fade? Remember
dancing in moon, legs
covered in cardinal pulp
soles smeared violet, kicked
up under a crescent so keen
its ends dripped with the blood
of stars—their dying lights.
But perhaps we should leave
an older yet still lusty Pan
to tell those tales lest we
be deemed too fervent
with our moon-honed, nectar-
loosened tongues.
~title based on Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter (fragment 18)
I have heard that life changes on a dime
and I can attest that is true.
Life has revealed many surprises
to me in the last two years,
both good and bad.
Birth and Death happen and what
comes in between, in large part,
are choices that we each make.
Choices and changes
are not easy to maneuver.
The crucial thing in the circle of
life that we are traveling
is that we demonstrate grace and
kindness to each other,
as each person chooses their own path.
Grief is not just for death
A cessation of feeling
Cessation of acting
Is like death, I guess.
Like how you stopped seeing me
I know you’re here,
The smell of your sweat
permeates the bedroom
like the boys’ locker room
in the basement of the high school,
all pheromones and testosterone
swirled in the cesspool of adolescence,
mashed between teeth
still sharp and unbroken.
I know you’re still here,
I can hear the sound you make
when you breathe in your sleep,
when your dreams rise almost close enough
to waking that the dogs howl back
and the moon shadows dance
through the trees outside the window.
I am angry enough that my voice is a deep
baritone, like a man,
growling warnings not to approach.
But this feeling needs a woman’s voice,
a siren to bring men
crashing upon the rocks
of her desire.
It is grief, in five steps.
I am long past denial,
and far short of acceptance.
I spit fire and breathe in
all the smells of you.
This is the beginning,
an apocalyptic beauty engulfs all roads
but the silver lane of moonlight I trace
down my own palm in the gathering dark.
My future grows from me,
every path another limb of a rose bush,
each fantasy at the end of every
thorned hand.
The roses start to blacken
like fruit fallen to my feet, leaving me
with this single
line of thought.
This is a temptress of some kind,
she pours her poisoned visions
like seawater, rushing to the gutters
of hometown.
Drags
images
out,
sweeps my shadow from the floorboards.
Her name is the same as mine.
She lets herself into my head,
consumes me from inside-out,
knows her way around my bones
just by feeling.
She is
giving up
every future
I’ve surrendered to.
She takes me by the hand,
window-shopping new lives at the pier,
and in every inhabited house I pass
I see each version of my heart
hanging from the garden bushes.
I can’t leave her alone,
her sun is so lovely curling down the cliffs
of my bruising spine, the sand, a collective
conscious, holds me better than every
perfume-hazing lover.
And tomorrow I’ll be in Paris
but tonight I’m not thinking of you.
I’m sleeping on the beach at noon.
I’m growing a new face to wear,
new thorns to wrap myself in,
a new city to dig into.
Some evenings, I take books off the shelf, and
I thumb through them, too:
the King James Bible, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita—
I try to recall the mythologies they taught me
and the stories they still tell, the mysteries they unfold
and the secrets we cannot understand;
but always, of course, there is the poetry—
Whitman and Eliot, Rumi and Rilke and Oliver—
Their music and their rhythms
walk with me through ever-shortening days and
watch with me through dark nights;
and they feel, somehow, the truest of all,
speaking as they do of beauty,
whether I see it or not; and of goodness, surely—
can I not feel it
in a thousand ways and words?
and are these companions not my kin?
and are they not
enough?
