This chapbook was selected for publication by Main Street Rag after finishing as a runner up in the 2002 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. Poems from this collection have also appeared in the following publications: The North American Review, Artful Dodge, The Blue Moon Review, Luna, The Red Rock Review.
Like Magic
Once upon a time there was a magician
who climbed into his hat and disappeared.
It must have been a relief from all those years
of mastering the shitting doves and fickle rabbits,
the mirrors and boxes and assistant with sequined breasts,
to give himself away completely, the way he used to do
with the lover who parted for him like the sea,
and gripped the short hairs at the back of his neck
whispering, come now, come inside me.
He’s good at that, pouring himself away
like orange juice into a glass and then crushing
the carton and tossing it into the garbage.He throws knives at his assistant,
cuts her in half and poof! makes her disappear,
but he doesn’t really have the heart for this work.
He steps outside and asks himself, why
does everything have to be loss and loss?
See the stars burning off in the blackness above,
just pissing away their energy for forever
and a day and then they’re dead?
Sometimes he wishes the Bomb would just go off
and turn everything into white light,
the theater whirling into sky, the sweet
audience yielding all their atoms at once.Harry has given it all away and left nothing.
That’s his magic act. Why bother to fix the deck?
His life has been shuffled into other lives
until he can’t tell what voice is speaking,
and from what stage, or why he’s standing
in the kitchen crying, or why he saws himself
to pieces and moans himself awake at night,
why he blows up in a puff of confetti and rains
down to earth like the sorrow of the gods.
He called up his friend to tell him he was turning
forty, and “Look, Harry,” his friend laughed,
“it’s easier if you don’t think of yourself
as half dead. Think of yourself as half alive.”
And who can tell how he lived ever after?
Breakfast in Athens
I sip a Nescafé and eavesdrop on
the couple next to me, the Asian teen
and milk-blonde girlfriend eating beets and greens.
Under the Athens sun, she is so blonde
you need smoked glass to see, her face so white
it bruises if you look at her, the slim
eyebrows disappearing into skin.
In a tan blouse she swells with light, is like
a laughing shifting field of wheat. Breakfast.
I watch two flies dogfight against the sign,
watch a big man on a slow moped whine
by, his red-shirted gut quivering fast.
Against the sky the Acropolis—stained teeth
and fractured marble jawbone—also eats.Hotel Thiseon, Athens, Greece
Nude Model Confesses
The artists scribble furiously at the white inside
of my thigh to get the precise curl of my pubic hair
before the pose is up, my naked Greek body
reclining on the platform sexless as a marble torso,
an architecture of muscle and bone,
or so I am told. But that’s crap, of course.
Sometimes after session I’m approached
by middle-aged men who want to compliment my form,
and I have trouble myself—tonight they’ve posed me
next to a woman from Russian literature class,
and as sweat shivers in the fine blond hairs above her lip
and the small chocolate bumps on her aureoles
scorch my pupils, my electric senses awake,
forces pour through me in waves
and my nihilist penis threatens to shatter creation.
What does a volt care about social order?
What does a wave care about propriety?
Shouldn’t I stand up arrogant as poor doomed
Bazarov, as murderously proud as Raskolnikov?
But no, I keep the swelling down
with a drab reiteration of multiplication
tables and the conjugation of Spanish verbs,
and lapse back into being
a model man by a model of a woman,
once again turning into art—as if
the audience were only watching
these planes arranged in light and shade,
a gesture that runs through the limbs like water,
and not this cock and chest, the violence
of these sweet breasts glazed in sweat.