Poems

Ambuscade

In November, time’s cascade ceases for an hour

sticky subway cars round their predetermined trails in the grisly darkness,

demanding mere circularity, deadlocked in their lack of closure

around and around (and around) again, arteries with no ventricle or cerebellum to serve

Swinging like a pendulum until all we can see is red.

Time teases the mind like a circadian sibling’s spat

Yes, candles burn to the metal plate, dropping nails with a clang (wake up)

counterfeiting as gifts wrapped in yellowed paper by febrile hands.

Now your incandescent dread lays trapped inside a glass birdcage,

Mocking the canary cuckoo-ing in the name of chronography-

He cannot fly but will twitch around the face until the wood warps away.

Slow down the earth, they told us, but as demands do,

it gifted us our stumble down the pulse of the snowy mountain-

it is dusk now that we’ve stirred awake at the bottom, isn’t it?

But it sure does feel like noon.

So now the thoughts float around with soft edges and doughy insides

Saved from all milieus, throbbing where you sat back in scorched superiority,

lazy and fat with tiredness from carrying the sun under your arms.

You mark minutes with scratches from a half-inkless pen,

satin patches where script emulates like the heat warping from Arizonan sand

invisible waves wash over mind and meaning as the moon tugs back the breakers.

Hello zeitgeber, would you care to dance until we’re dizzy?

Spin and spin and round the floor ten to six to three to twelve.

Filles aux Bleuets

She held her life in her own hands as if it were little blueberries

from the coast of Maine, picked too early (they are sour,

and they spill in raindrops slick across the cliffs)

No, best to pick when they are pot-bellied, juicy

almost ready to burst in late August

while the cicadas laugh at the circumstance.

No, darling, best to get them mid-August

when the sun fails to kiss the ocean until after eight,

and not every creak is a sign of despair like in December.

They sustain soundness in their purple skin,

But their flesh is green with tiny seeds like birthed spiders

spilling out into wicker baskets meant to contain them,

Shining like anniversary gifts of diamond tennis bracelets

And the hold of ambivalence.

No, it’s too late, and the filles in gingham skirts

Clutch them captive within tiny fingers

pressing down on the pulse, too hard

Gifting themselves purple blotches, warnings

Of their future if they don’t pick right.

Soon they’ll herd their prizes home

And their mothers will round them up into the latest pastry

A square or bar or pie of sorts,

Housewives ruling over them in their granite-countertop-bay-window kitchens

(the resale value is high, they say, if they decide to leave this life)

The sourness can be dispelled by just the right amount of sugar,

plus some extra for the girls (they must stay sweet, darling.)