I just wrote this first poem today. I don't know how it happened, and once again, it's from a man's perspective (perhaps I'm in need of some serious psychoanalysis).
A Turning
You have changed direction
in the kitchen, bird
slipping on the green
tile, as if figure
skating, and I remember
your yoga class stories, the cunning
of your tongue
conspicuously tipping on your right
canine, as if to say also, and not to
say what you could do
in bed.
This is your language—
the
non-language language
which keeps our small mouthed relationship
eventful,
and uneventful; the way you
stroke your forth finger,
left hand, while we are
eating pizza in the living room,
and after we make
love on the orange couch, sagging as if it has just
given birth and its womb is full
of nothing.
You have signals, and yes,
I read you.
We watch movies,
my movies, and you fall asleep
twenty minutes in.
When I ask you how
you liked the show
you say, always you say, you
did,
sort of. I say,
You would have liked it if you were awake,
and you— soft and broken,
lax as fabric just out
of the dryer—
whisper,
I was awake.
And I thought I'd include the poems that have been accepted to be published in Weave Magazine:
Only Transactions
I.
It was the question in your head why certain people
will not look you in the eyes. It was the man turning apricots
on his thumb, pressing into bruises, looking the kiss of skin
as if a wound. You had asked him, making the usual words:
How are you, today? And either he spoke another language,
or he did not want to turn his face up to your sound.
When he finally looked up, he saw your hands,
and stayed with them, and that was fine—the soft green bills
unfolding between you, the plastic bag whipping up,
opening like a new yellow lung, sweeping back to the table.
II.
After that, a day of men keeping their eyes down—
taking only transactions, fruit, testing everything, you needed
pouring coffee beans into a grinder, your sister speaking in her large
eyed way, and even the conversation, however it started, of when
your mother would die, and how could either of you handle that.
She said, I want to go first. You told her you wanted a husband by then,
to sit on the floor with you, who would hold the pictures up in his
hands of your mother, and her mother, the pictures taken before you
lived, the pictures in black and white, yellowing.
III.
Another man came in today and he said he was not going
to buy anything, but he wanted to talk, looking you
straight, he smiled, told his story: Missle testing sites in July,
tucking the nose of jets into their bellies, lowering docks,
firing and watching how many colors you can make
out of sand in Northern Texas, out of atoms split wide, the oily ocean
at the shore of hell. He said, he lost that job, he lost everything.
You notice, in the silence after, how hard it is to keep your gaze
steady on the weighted water of his.
In Spirit
We are afraid she is not touching the bed,
our mother, levitating again,
lifting in her old bones lying
there, her mothballed nightgown
inflating as if it were a great
lung, her whole body pitching itself
to the slope of her voice, coming up
out of her like the fin of a fish
cutting the dark surface of water:
Do not kill me.
Our tongues are stuck to our teeth
while her voice stretches to us,
standing around her in suits, black,
we were tired, until she came at us
in spirit, yes,
is she here?
Her body lies on the bed, and I think of sliding
my hand beneath her shoulder blades just to see,
just to see if she has died yet.
Thanks for reading!
