stick ice picks
through their eardrums. Some
never open up their throats.
It’s been this way
for ages. Here,
feel these in your palm,
tears the storks shed.
Familiar?
Behind Glass
I am something here
behind glass,
my name in English and
italicized Latin.
No one goes by without tapping.
After I’d been captured,
I was lowered
to this rock,
too small to hide behind,
too sharp to crawl under.
I have bowls,
white shiny bowls,
shallow one for pellets,
deep one to drink from
but not drown in.
Nights when the lights dim,
I inch up the glass.
By sunup, collapse
in my dent
in the gravel.
No one hears me breathe,
no one hears me scuttle.
No one
hears me
tap back.
Crib Note
This is your last chance
to pick me up
or I am crawling up
on my trike
crossing the interstate when
a let-up in traffic
getting work
wherever I can get it
sleeping
in unlocked cars
finding
food
giving up on love
after a series of nannies
taking my own
hand
walk-
ing.
Special Delivery
That little kid’s been playing
in the snow all morning and when I
venture out, I see his face is identical
to mine when I was seven.
I call to him, hey kid, come here a minute
and he yells back, I don’t wanna come in yet, Ma.
Milkman just happened to be coming up the walk
and reminded me, you know kids these days,
they don’t care who their parents are,
they’re just glad they can call one or two theirs.
It’s then the little kid calls in his direction,
hey Pop, you got chocolate?
The Two Armstrongs
Boy deep down inside the man
has Keds on. Springy as a pogo stick.
Divides his day-to-day among his pockets:
maps, collapsible telescope,
Mars bars, compass.
On his belt, canteen full of life force:
Kool-Aid or Tang.
Boy’s been rattling the man’s
thorax. Man just calls it gas,
something he ate. Words come,
sound like module, lunar.
Doctor comes,
pulls a beanie, bent propeller
from the man’s esophagus.
Boy launches
like a Saturn 5 rocket. Lands
in a silver-on-the-inside cape.
When he lifts his arms,
a thousand parakeets fall out.
Doctor falls down.
Man puts down
his instruments.
Throws his keys
into nearby weeds and woods.
Donates explorer/discoverer biographies.
Stops the mail.
Boy shows him
how to walk all over again,
leave prints
that make good pictures. How
not to kick up dust, jar rocks.
Eventfully they plant a flag.
Place hands upon hearts.
Never before, stripes
wide as these. Never again,
stars this close.
Peninsulaville
Outside Ken’s bedroom window
is a whale. Not a whale of a something
but a humpback, according to his Book
of Whales. His mom is screaming
because her garden of the month
is under it and its ajar mouth
and louvered shutter of baleen
are pressed against the kitchen
window. Ken’s dad is on the horn
to whalers his fingers stopped on
in the Yellow Pages. As a backup he’s calling
the chainsaw rental place over on Broad.
Ken’s dad’s the practical one,
his mom, the hysterical one just like all
the families on the block with an only child.
Whereabouts
One Monday when they both have off,
Joe and the Mrs. go walking
in the cobblestone streets of the Middle East
and come across Son, full-grown,
selling fish pitas through a window.
Ordering two and refillable lemonades,
they lean for awhile against a wall,
then ask why he isn’t making tables
and something for them to sit on.
Son shrugs his shoulders
and Joe and the Mrs. shrug theirs
and take another bite and gulp. They nod
they are happy to see Son in one place
but Son tells them he wants to open
franchises all over the known world
and ever the aspirer, beyond. After a clearing
of throats, lip wiping and teeth picking,
Joe and the Mrs. empty their pockets
on the sill and tell Son of a place called Miami
and he definitely needs to ease up on the salt.
Next day Son books a passage on a trade ship
and ends up cooking for the captain and crew
to pay his way and on the way among islands
and ports and the vast sand stretches,
the cruise ship industry is born.
Months later,
loaded and living in a condo overlooking
Biscayne Bay, Son sends for his parents,
now retired and living on a fixed income.
One week before their arrival,
they’re reported lost in the Bermuda Triangle
so Son sets out in the middle of the night
and finds himself in the eye of a Category 5.
No one’s seen hide nor hair.
No one’s heard a word.
Son Time
I know you from Cairo,
my five year old says
to a total stranger.
I apologize for my son
but the stranger says,
it was at the Al Fishawi’s,
I remember. A dog got loose.
Yup, my son says, I’m the one
who caught it and took it
to the cook. The stranger
shakes my son’s hand,
says, I always wondered what
happened to you. I see
you escaped the soldiers.
I did, my son says,
and it wasn’t all that easy
if you get my drift.
I do I do, admits the stranger
whose name is Bob. Bob says,
I’m going to Barcelona
in the spring. Me too,
my son says, I want to see
some Gaudi and learn
Spain Spanish.
I tell my son we need to be
going, it’s time for supper.
Time for what? he
asks.
What, A Day
Each day is not a new day for Terry.
Take last Thursday.
He repeated it on Friday
and again on Sunday. Yes,
it was that good.
Even when bad,
a day gets repeated,
sometimes once a week for months.
People other than Terry
have told me on occasion they miss a day,
particularly from work
and usually find it at home
or at the beach, the casino.
I tell Terry
on both our days off
I’d like a day
when the planet is spinning so fast it turns it
into the next without so much as a night
and you see yourself coming and going at the same time,
there is that much light.
Terry turns to me, yup, that
will be a day.
Night to Remember
What if Venus and Saturn, and Mars along for blush,
did meet up that night outside delivery?
What if all that the parents had in the world
was the donkey? Be assured, a Cadillac of donkeys.
And what if the parents themselves were drop-dead
gorgeous with perfect SATs and Harvard behind them?
What if the inimitable Three Tenors showed up
with the sounds of glass breaking behind them
and smelling like the canals of Venice?
Indeed it would be a night to remember,
everyone standing around wondering
if this new little comet would ever shut up,
if Earth could stand still long enough for a picture,
if up is verily where we go from here.
Reward
Samuel finds an angel wing, a left one,
hanging in the pear tree in his side yard.
Local paper does a feature
and its picture is broadcast full-span
on the six o’clock news.
Samuel decides to make it
the rest of his life’s work if need be
to return the wing to the angel who too must feel lost.
Hey, you got wings and one’s missing,
who wouldn’t feel lost?
And the wing, the wing
has got to feel lost without its angel.
Anyway, by the look on his face,
Samuel has no clue where to start
but starts by putting the wing back in the pear tree,
way up high on a tippy-top branch where
punks and strays cannot get at it
and just after a few hours up there in broad daylight,
gone.
Then this pear
seemingly from out of nowhere
falls on Samuel’s head
and bounces into his already-cupped hands.
It is the most perfect pear he’s ever held or beheld.
He carries it to his kitchen and puts it in a bowl
where in less than a week
it stinks to high heaven.
Very Last Body of Water
We thought
down at the government
we’d shape it
like an hourglass,
tribute
to its life-giving force. Of course
you can only see
its shape
if you’re up above it.
We know
you want to touch it
so we’re passing around
a bowl.
Dip a finger, taste it,
flick some
in the dirt.
Stir it into mud,
beautiful beautiful mud.
Smear some
on a cheek.
Dab some
on a brow.
Close your eyes keep them closed.
Try to picture
cloud.
New Ark
Noah didn’t know it but his couples cruise
could have led a mission to the moon
or some new planet captured in his scrolls.
Leonardo left no doodles dangling in his margins
of even one contraption big enough to get
an animal kingdom cargo across his universe.
Hubble’s pixels don’t reveal a hint of prints,
no teeth nor bones of beings as we know them,
even out among nearby pulsars and quasars.
So let’s put out a call to any UFO hovering
just above the trees or snorkeling on the reef.
Say things are mighty shaky here. Please overnight
these sole surviving, genetically unmodifieds
to greener pastures, whiter waters,
skies beyond our wildest blue yonders.
Last Wishes
I want to walk above the East River
before I die. On the Brooklyn Bridge
of course. I know I’ll die
before I see Architeuthis alive.
Heard tell its razor beak
could take my head off like a lollipop.
Meanwhile I promise not to get too close
to rims of any ruins. I’ll try to take
just one stair at a time. Will you
take my hand for all
of my last wishes? I won’t beg
although my time is just around a corner
like the bistro famous for last suppers.
When you see me on the other side,
my hair will be slicked back
but I won’t have on my snake boots.
Look for me among submersibles.
Look for me among the birds and planes.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of the publications in which the following poems have appeared, occasionally in slightly different versions or with different titles:
Avatar Review: “Last Wishes”
Bird’s Thumb: “Appalachia”
Café Review: “Dementia” (reprinted in April 2009
Editors’ Edition)
Chelsea Station: “Laughing”
Cincinnati Review, University of Cincinnati:
“Less is Milk”
Coe Review, Coe College: “Breaking the News”
Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian State University:
“Moves”
Edison Literary Review: “The Resonance in Magnetic”
Faultline, University of California, Irvine:
“Building a Better Mouse”
Forge: “Night to Remember” and “Peninsulaville”
Helen: A Literary Magazine: “Dreamboat”
Heliotrope: “Postcard from Vermont”
Imitation Fruit: “Crib Note”
Licking River Review, Northern Kentucky University:
“Juice” (originally titled “Cost to Get Back
into Summer”)
Lumberyard: “Birder”
LUNGFULL! Magazine: “Son Time”
Oak Bend Review: “Dementia”
Oxford Magazine, Miami University, Ohio:
“Bruised Patella”
Packingtown Review, University of Illinois, Chicago:
“Accounting Major” and “Chicken Little”
Passager: “Suburban Pastoral” and
“The Two Armstrongs”
Pemmican: “Atlas”
RFD Magazine: “That You, Dawn”
Red Booth Review: “Win Win” and “Different Directions”
righthandpointing: “Make Do”
Spank th
e Carp: “Hookey”
Stickman Review: “Out of Water”
Syzygy: “Meteorology of Me” and “Flying Objects”
Triggerfish Critical Review: “For Ages”
Williamsport Guardian: “Pyrogyro”
Windsor Review, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada:
“Day the Moon Was Out All Day”
I would like to thank the editors, especially Jaynie Royal, and everyone at Regal House Publishing for their generosity and unfailing support. I would like to thank my fellow writers in the Market Street Writers’ Co-op in Williamsport, Pennsylvania for listening to and critiquing many of these poems. Thank you to the late Penelope (Penny) Austin for her friendship and encouragement. Thank you to my inspiring teachers in poetry at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Extra special thanks to Rebecca Kinzie-Bastian and Matthew Lippman for tirelessly tending to the manuscript during it preparation. Last but not least, I want to thank my family and friends for everything else.
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