tired of drooping his ears
under tables and desks.
But we are all gods here ambushed
in the center of the infinite wooden
babushka doll,
clawing and crawling
and cussing and singing
all praises, all hail
the Great Babushka.
I submit now, roll on my back,
in a wooden container like
a babushka doll under a desk,
miming and suffocating and cowering
with simple movement like a puppet.
Society, I bring you clichés now.
I bring you red roses
and blue violets.
I cower under your table,
and like a dog,
I piss on your floor.
Pandora
Remember, remember, this is now,
and now, and now. Live it, feel it,
cling to it.
–Sylvia Plath
It is Mother’s Day Sunday, and I have
read the chapter of Luke before opening
the dusty box of yours, my deceased mother.
Your journal is sealed with the emblem
of an asylum. Your name written, chiseled
into the top like a vintage museum piece.
I open your words, gloveless,
a box of evils sprouting into the world,
red, red apples thrusting into the open
air like sins, hope left in the bottom
corner next to a ball of lent.
Lately, I have been reading the journals
of Plath like a bible thinking they were you,
reading the chapters and verses and now,
and now, and now, I am finally holding
your words which are distorted,
which are incomprehensible
through a bell jar of tears.
Remember, remember the chapped lips
of your smile, the features of your face,
the swampy feeling of my cheek after your kiss.
And to see your journal lying here next to Plath’s,
next to mine, juxtaposed, is colossal.
We have spoken to each other now,
clung to each other now, through written
telepathy, our journals mingling in comparable
time discussing life as two old feminists
in rocking chairs, like Plath and Sexton
chuckling, rocking, like Eve reaching
for a red, red apple.
Paul R. Davis
Landscape
I like the way
lamplight makes the page
of the book
I’m reading gleam.
A wild vanilla with
crazed insects wobbling
into my mind.
I start to close
the book
and night appears,
sheep stranded high
on the outcropping.
Between the pages
is the everdark valley
of no language,
where words cross over
hurriedly to reach
the other side.
I put the book down,
the words don’t fall out,
or over themselves.
They are locked in place,
like fresh eggs in their
cartons, asleep
and dreaming of speech.
Second Vision
Too many eyes, too many things to see.
Twin cathedral steeples, nipples
erupting from the breasts of God.
Signs falsely proclaiming pizza is both
original and Italian.
Conversations boomerang off bent elbows,
mismatched words litter avenues.
Briefcases, laptop attache cases,
bag lunches, boxes of pizza for one:
FedEx will not deliver your life
or you from it.
Clouds invade your shoes,
your pockets full of gray money,
handfuls of anxiety fall out of your hat.
Afraid to go home, afraid of the continual fear,
drowning in the comfortable couch.
Going to sleep naked,
one sheet, one blanket,
2,738 dreams you won’t remember.
Morning is a roving wolf,
eating the bones you forgot.
Eating Molly’s Pie
It was a sunny morning,
sky of flour and butter.
I went out to eat
some of Molly’s pie,
came away fuller than the moon.
It was noon like turtles lounging.
I went out and had some more
of Molly’s pie.
I left the desk,
overturned the timesheet,
went out like a thunderstorm.
I looked in corners where butts are thrown,
looked at signs like forgotten face cards,
looking for Molly’s pie.
Close to midnight
down by the river,
Hungry Davy was there,
eating the last of Molly’s pie.
I cried up, all the way through my hair,
wanting some of Molly’s pie.
Klismos
(4th Century Greek chair, perhaps the first of Western civilization)
Ladies, be seated.
Rest in elegance and wait for the news.
Your husbands are in the fields,
or fighting for Athens.
When Rome ascends,
when Saint Peter visits,
he will be crucified but leave a seat
for his crude descendants.
But this will be hidden, kept secret
from the tillers and the potters.
They will have curved backs,
broken backs, will lack support.
Castle residents will know the comfort,
the tribute from the fields, the gathering laws.
Conquistadores will bring saddles
and crucifixes to a world reclining.
They will join with missionaries
to bring enlightenment and germs.
All the world will be seated:
To work, to learn, to take rest.
What wondrous device will ennoble us?
How will nature uncivilized devolve?
We will lose our legs, take on those of wood,
carved with faces straining under the weight.
Our backs will weaken,
our eyes forget the wide vistas scouting danger,
our minds will turn more quietly.
We will be soothed.
The oceans are crossed while we stand
before the compass, afraid to sit and
not see the upright horizon.
These new lands have knowledge
of running and resting,
but we bring strange new instruments
lacking harmony with nature.
Forests are hacked down,
the wood is shaped into towns,
houses and their possessions,
legs and spindles hold us in place.
Intricacy and detail envelop our bodies,
stiffnecked we suffer the hardness
of where we sit.
The plains and rivers hold freedom
like butterfly wings hold the sun,
we seek the prairie grass to burn.
The western shore is gained
but there is no rest for our business,
still we are straight-backed.
Leisure is acquired with sweat
and now we can know comfort
of leather, of upholstery,
feathering our labors.
Finally, we sit: collapsed,
to think of new inventions,
made for human bodies.
New devices take craft
and they have arm
s, levers,
footrests and let us dream.
All in beautiful reveries,
we take our seats.
Philip Jackey
Garage drinking after 1989
Her world will spiral like a merry-go-round in the belly of storms.
The matches and lighter fluid she’ll buy at Walmart
will seem a lot less dangerous than they did before—
well as the cheap vodka that’ll burn within her throat,
and after the fifth or sixth shot, it won’t burn anymore.
Cobwebs will surround her; in all corners they’ll spread like lies.
Spiders will fuck other spiders; their egg sacs swaying
with momentum like a Newton’s cradle.
And with her back turned, few feet away,
an industrial fan will spin at its highest speed.
She hates the heat; it sweats out the alcohol,
and nothing smells worse than the depths of disease
protruding through stale fragrance that will embed,
into vintage tank tops with Mickey Mouse on the front,
over a pink bra and blue denim shorts bathed
in Giorgio perfume—wrinkled and creased, and
crammed in a cardboard box on top another cardboard box:
the furthest decade she’s able to reach without a step stool—
the last one she’ll ever trust, to rational thinking.
Only stigmas will remain—of oil and antifreeze,
Fieros and Firenzas, Madonna in the tape deck—
the beaming of the headlights unfolding
the shadows that ascend to the ceiling.
Hanging hacksaws will warp into sharp fangs.
Lawn rakes into claws.
And the storm will come. Her gutters will surely give,
to pouring rain under black clouds, blacker than their predecessors,
bringing bad fortune through meandering felines.
Soaking black Maine Coons take shelter with lemon-marble eyes
gouged from years of sidewalk disputes, and yet to purr thereafter.
Instead they will stay still, struggle to see,
their eyes slowly dimming like a wicker candle.
And she will feel pity—for whom or what, she won’t know,
just enough to understand belligerence will not kill the pain.
A lit match to methanol works best.
Swimming at night in suburbia
The pool shines mercury beneath the moonlight,
where young girls jump off of diving boards into the deep,
somewhat ashamed as only their bikini tops break the surface,
spilling polka-dots, some amber, others amaranth.
And the boys can’t see, only touch, because chlorine
burns their eyes the same way liquor does their virgin throats,
sinking ten feet to the bottom, haggling air through a kiss—
sealed, the radio drowns by a thousand pin drops,
and the girls allow to be touched with pruny fingers.
Subterranean lights beam bright,
outlining shapes, the shadows: a frog
who gave his life in the skimmer, a thousand
ripples projected on a white painted fence, and silhouettes,
all different sizes as they watch their former selves,
slide off eachother, poor attempts at a carnal act,
squeezing the air out of inflatable rafts,
on such a night where fireflies dress their best,
and luminesce the pungent air.
Granny and Papa’s house
And for sure this house is haunted;
it moans at night like papa did,
when he wasn’t papa anymore,
rather a sad story of children and their children
and pestilent cancer cells, his sunken cheeks pale,
and white as the ghosts who live here.
If you listen close, you still hear his son,
been dead since ’72—
plastered to a tree, killed instantly,
thrown out the window like a sack of shit,
the same way most repudiated
his mendacious words of advice.
And you can still smell the menthols,
almost if she hadn’t lost to the stroke
ten years prior, my granny,
who smoked before you could die from smoking,
turning the walls to dirt, stained dull yellow
like the nicotine on papa’s teeth.
And granny’s the kind of gal papa read poems about,
and papa didn’t read poems, he was more
a hands on kind of man,
who preferred using fists when he’s pissed off, scared,
and even in love because granny swears
that one of the holes papa punched through the closet door
was in the perfect shape of a heart.
And you could see right thru,
skeletons stacked on skeletons.
Karen Hoy
A Naturalist in New York
I cannot see the buildings
of Manhattan in the dark,
though at a far journey’s end
as we cross
(yes it is,
confirms the driver)
the Brooklyn Bridge
towers of window lights are rising
in the buildings’ negative space.
It’s the way each
illuminated giant facet turns,
revealing more as we approach.
Transitions of galaxies,
oblong astronomical bodies
in a moving geometric display;
metropolitan northern lights,
and I am in awe.
I’ve seen things as stunning before:
the terrace of salt-white
pools at Pamukkale;
the cap of Kilimanjaro
afloat on African clouds;
stalactite ballrooms in
Carlsbad Caverns;
a neon-red sunset
on the Serengeti.
I feel my own turning,
my marrow re-engaging
in ways I didn’t know
my insides could fit.
I’m not a city person
is no longer available
as I adapt and rearrange;
a discontinuation
of a former stock phrase.
Nan’s Photographs
That one, that’s my favourite,
of my mother in a tutu,
age sixteen, on points,
with her raven hair straight
from a white hairband
and her hands arched above her.
of all your photographs
of even that one of me
with my brothers
when I wouldn’t keep still
at the photographers,
and Darryl is smiling
and Kevin has been instructed
to keep me on the seat
I’m already half off,
as if at any minute
eighteen month old me
will slither to the bottom
of the round frame
and drop, gurgling
onto your hall carpet.
more than the scattered ones
in little straight frames
around your bookshelves
and the dresser;
a collection of cousins
in the dull plumage
of successive school seasons.
This photo,
my mother; your daughter;
the family’s only dancer.
Look at her—
our loose-tendoned
connecting icon
in her own space,
owning the frame.
I love this photo,
how it shows excellence
pursued, found,
redelivered on demand
for the camera’s exposure;
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her talent in black and white,
en pointe in a silvered
chemical capture.
For Peter in Memory of Jo
Meteorites land mostly
in the sea
or in forests
far from our eyes.
Sandcastles are always
washed away
by the tide—
they don’t survive.
But in between
these statistics
are things we risk
by being alive.
By survival
we’re defined by
losing people,
precious people,
lost to us,
the ones behind.
Somewhere on earth
a meteorite.
Ankles are lapped
by sand
sent swirling
into flower-shaped fractals:
a million tiny rocks
in the tide.
Mrs Bing and Mrs Bailey
and the list read
Bing Bing Bailey Bailey
Bing Bing Bailey.
Visiting you, we waited
with the suitcase, by
the noticeboard on the lobby wall,
while Mum brought in
the rest of our stuff,
letting the double doors close off
to the hot ice-cream-dripped tarmac
of an English just-a-half-season
or the rest of the year’s