Persephone
Long ago you poured
the orange juice with both hands.
Your knuckles turned white
from a weight too heavy for
your songbird wrists.
Someone called you honey.
The carpet tickled
the skin between your toes
and cereal took you far at breakfast.
The spoon was your pickaxe,
you mined what you liked.
All things tasteless,
left to dissolve.
Your mother waited in the earth swell.
But you slept in,
asked the gods for five more minutes.
You left your phone between couch cushions.
Didn’t hear it ring. Muffled screaming.
Now you hide your face in the collar of your shirt.
At night, you lie next to him
and the radiator snores for you.
When you stare up at the brain-dead
ceiling, all you can remember is the rye
and the wailing wind,
the sun coming up every morning,
the seasons never changing.
You were once brave.
You ate chocolate chips in palmfuls.
Now you eat quinoa. What is
quinoa? You have pomegranates
sometimes, when you’re with the girls.
You gorge yourself on the bloodshot seeds.
Infanticide, you think.
They keep you caught in this world
as punishment. You eat anyway.
The girls ask if you started working out.
Dieting? New routines?
Actually, you’ve been smoking.
You kill babies for youth.
You look younger, they say.
Which is funny, you think.
That’s real funny.
You tell them you’ve been working.
Just working
School Bus
The wheels sing rusty high
into the street’s sandpaper sallow,
chanting their revolutions,
slower upon slowly.
They ride the same grooves,
play the old tracks.
Blackberry chewing gum
sticks the boombox windows,
gear stick swung starboard.
Beneath the bill of a cap, he asks
when will they hop the turnstile traffic,
cut the two gas stations, kick the uphill
curb of home? Seat belts shake their heads,
slither into torn foam fissures.
Cheek against the glass,
battered. Steel rattles as it blunders on.
This upside-down bowl of a
town, nothing leaks through the gulch
where the rim meets the dry earth.
Rain never stirred the dust, never
stuck around. His brain turns to steam
in oppressive heat. The pleather whispers
sagging comfort, its distortion
wrapping its arms around his sinking waist.
The loose fibers at the seams,
the wrinkled eraser shavings,
stroke the sweat from his forehead.
He sits, feet planted in the metal floor’s furrows
by leaden backpacks pinning down his toes
should he choose to disembark.
The Storyteller
He wears clumsy woolen stitches around a birdlike neck
and knows exactly what you’re thinking.
He holds souls in the box of tic-tacs
tucked into the front pocket of his faded jeans,
listening to them rattle.
At night he sinks into the lichen of park benches,
breathing the ozone through a ziploc of dust.
He weaves fables out of grass and dead leaves
for a coin dropped into the pasty canvas of his palm.
His words never falter because he’s made of them.
They multiply in his belly and spill from chapped lips,
becoming the soil beneath his nails.
On chillier nights he claims
to have once known a simpler science.
Then came humidity like kerosene,
fire rolling down green hills.
Lotus flowers sailed headless into trenches,
fireworks forgot to fly.
“Beware of straight teeth,” he lisps,
stabbing the breeze with a finger like twine.
The neon lights spin on his lashes,
I run my dry tongue over metal brackets.
Night
The pit of the dead saint
flowers in the glimmer.
White light seals the scrolls of centipedes
lying dry in a mottled well,
the dimple in the sky
rounds the clearest porthole,
the bluest fever to behold.
Skin peaks with shy terror.
The gloaming scale reads
the most infant of weights.
The lowland roamers toss their heads,
a summer spell seduces gravity.
Lime embers rise as freckles on a stoic face.
Fresh wooded limbs wind up the clouds,
spinning silk in vanity.
How lonesome they are
as they scribe their names,
dragging their finger-points
across the memory of constellations.
The House
By Winter’s dusk I stride the foreign street,
And soon I find God’s perfect shell
Of ivied brick where stories dwell.
Its darkened windows deign to greet
The passersby who stare; how rare
A plan of elegance, long rooted there.
I peer into its fine defeat.
Fearing night with home so far,
I trespass to the threshold’s screams.
The ceiling molds a blackened largo at the seams.
The rugs are starred with spent cigars,
Nails borne from floors like rusting teeth.
Where boasts the gold, where hangs the wreath?
I know not why, but there are scars.
With harried sweat the panic sets,
I leave behind the wretched mine.
Why do we tend to hold divine
That fantasy of unpaid debts?
To me love seems to follow reams
Of contracts made in spite of dreams—
For I have seen what time begets.
Father
I find the sunset in its slow, southward samba,
sashaying to the doorstep. My eyes dip far down
the pathway, where he’s coming up quickly,
perched imperfectly, hugging
the paper bag. Childlike, with bird-steps,
a full-footed tiptoe, bifocals narrating
in two tenses. Maybe that’s why he misses
the ground with his foot;
he sees the paper route moped and the BMW,
the flight of April 1975 and the morning traffic
in the same instant. He falls
as if he’s listening to the lilt of the axis
too keenly with ears that aren’t his own.
Groceries are tumbling, turning
over, hitting the ground like maladroit meteorites.
His palms scrape the soil, his fingers
dulled spades combing through mud.
Hunched spine like a monk
praying with his forehead.
He replants his creased loafers,
one by one onto the crabgrass.
There are clammy eclipses on his knees,
the color of dew on a victim.
When he looks up at me,
his eyes are dark-ringed
apologetic apertures,
shuttering to preserve each anxious moment.
My mouth mirrors his, an open stagnant
cavern in which sound only echoes.
My instinct is not to reach out,
but to watch, to someday follow.
I’m doing my job—waiting.