Starting Out, Starting Over
1.
Yellowed pillowcase–wrapped ice pack
pressed under papà’s purpling eye,
my job’s to care, to tend
the swellings of bags, make home
feel like home.
2.
Milton’s on its way,
the county put together a buffet
of sand at Twin Lakes park,
I spoon–feed a mound
to twelve sandbags until they’re smooth,
to keep out the flood.
3.
Papa’s weekly shower’s
always on Sunday,
it lowers the risk
of infection, when I change his piss bag.
4.
Winter lowers its hooks,
the heating in the flat gasps,
coughs, my sleeping bag’s
opened and spread like a lung over my bed,
wondering.
5.
The truck’s disappeared
the obsidian garbage bags,
the street’s empty,
morning can lie down again.
6.
Slim hope
that the brown paper
plus plastic doggy bag will
keep the fries
from seeping their blood into my car seat.
7.
They bring over a bag
for the man lying down, fetal,
like his moon–bent motorcycle,
the street’s empty.
8.
Which one’s good for tummy-aches?
I rattle the little bin
of tea bags,
they’re all the same.
9.
I feel the same
as I stand up from the ashes
of who–knows–how–much–weed
or money I burned up
with the pipe I don’t know how to use,
as I text got the bag, triumphantly.
10.
Katy Perry’s on the radio,
I Vin Diesel–drive from work,
the Weather Channel’s CGI
turns Milton into a plastic bag
on Florida’s face.
11.
The content always gets more hype
than the container, the atom(s)
of modernity, the sand(s)
of the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch,
it’s easier, much easier,
to name the world scumbag.
12.
At the shelter, I say the cat’s in the bag,
I press Storm, now–named Romoletto,
into the carrier
like bread over jelly and I
bring him home.
…
A Mesopotamian Priest
The fronds past my window wagged,
like when someone acts cartoon
scary over a campfire
with splayed fingers and below–voice
oooooooo’s. I was a good girl
doing homework, reading that:
Science was born in Ancient Greece
when brave Thinkers wrestled Reason
and Deduction out from the cold
arms of magic.
A Mesopotamian Priest
talked to a lamb and swiped open
her stomach— a sacrifice
to Shamash, to the Sun
—so as to peek into a mess
that the future was nestling in.
Some Scientists voila’d a mutt
off the Moscow streets and named her
and stuck her in a two–by–four
cone–shaped rocket.
Science can’t be un–forcep’d
from mama and she’s still growing up.
The Sun rice–cooked Laika to death
as She orbited the Earth.
The Thinkers got their data,
small tangle.
The critters don’t give a fuck
about what’s magic, what’s mama,
what’s science, what’s baby.
Same old, same old.
Simile, metaphor:
those who name you are still the ones
who stab you and those who stab you
still whisper in your ear
and kiss your nose.
……………….
